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BR 1702 ,B673 1926 
Boreham, Frank, 1871-1959. 
A faggot of torches 


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OTHER BOOKS BY MR. BOREHAM 


A BUNCH OF EVERLASTINGS 
A CASKET OF CAMEOS 

A HANDFUL OF STARS 

A REEL OF RAINBOW 

FACES IN THE FIRE 

THE CRYSTAL POINTERS 
THE GOLDEN MILESTONE 
THE HOME OF THE ECHOES 
THE LUGGAGE OF LIFE 

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HILL > 
MOUNTAINS IN THE MIST 
MUSHROOMS ON THE MOOR: 
RUBBLE AND ROSELEAVES 
SHADOWS ON THE WALL 
THE SILVER SHADOW 

THE UTTERMOST STAR 
WISPS OF WILDFIRE 


A FAGGOT OF 
TORCHES 


TEXTS THAT MADE HISTORY 


“By 
F. W. BOREHAM 





THE ABINGDON PRESS 


NEW YORK CINCINNATI 


Copyright, 1926, by 
F. W. BOREHAM 


All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, 
including the Scandinavian 


Printed in the United States of America 


CONTENTS 


CHAP. PAGE 
I. ALLEN GARDINER’S TEXT ........00000. | 9 

Tf. Auecustus Toprapy’s TEXT ose. 2.3 21 
PEL THOMAS CARLYLE S) PEXTG Os oe 33 
SV OO ROBERT PULLER SVL ERIC S fat me cince aman 45 
WPA UGUSTING SS DE XT: tate kene es sii aca wend 5 
VI. JosEPHINE BuTLER’S TEXT............. 69 
Mie }OHN) WOOLMAN'S' TEXT) souls ce os 81 
VIII. Fvopor DostovEvsky’s TEXT.......... 94 
PRI LORN LLAMPDEN'S CEXT. 10) 0 bes dei’ 106 
MeN ICEBLE S TEXT (0.4. secs udu eens 118 
XI. JouHN COLERIDGE PATTESON’s TEXT...... 129 
vide ENOCH STAPLETON'S PERT. os. Sei ees os 141 
DeMIPC RICHARD DAXTER'S CEXT 6 So 154 
Pie LORtCHT ISHITS PERT fi) 25) iv chy: 166 
CMEC TORGE LOX OER Tey ik trial ofele Aiaies lelaraee 178 
PCy OCTOR JOHNSON S TEXT ici elas nl ace o's 189 


6 CONTENTS 


CHAP. PAGE 

AVET. Buais® PAScAL’s TEXT... 00. eee ua ew 200 

AVILL; LEGVLOLSTOY’s TERT yaa tome ean 212 x 
BAS HOSeruL’s (LEX ys ea ate eee 224 | 
ia WER. GLADSTONE BUDE SRM Malice mens iss 235 
Dek 1.) JOHN NELSON'S “Deere arn. etl 247 


XXIL Harrier BEEcHER STOWE’S TEXT....... 257 |/ 


BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 


WE need a new Plulosophy of Words. It has been 
the fashion, of late years, to belittle their value. 
“Words! Words! Words!’ we say, impatiently, 
with Hamlet; and certainly they do at times grow 
wearisome. They seem so pitifully futile, so ridic- 
ulously cheap! And yet ! 

Words represent a vital element in history. Is 
there no subtle significance in the record that teils 
how, when God created the heaven and the earth, 
He employed words as the tools best suited to His 
task? ‘Let there be light!’ He said, and there was 
light. He spake and it was done. 

In this book and in its three predecessors—A 
Bunch of Everlastings, A Handful of Stars, and 
A Casket of Cameos—I have endeavoured to show 
that the principle has never ceased to operate. 
Through the agency of words—words as divine 
and as imperative as the awful fiat that, on 
earth’s primal morning, broke the silence of eter- 
nity—darkness is being continually dispelled and 
new worlds called into being. By means of some 
sublime word—startling, piercing, convincing, al- 
luring—a new man is made, and the new man 
ushers in a new age. Were it not for those words 
—words of pity and grace and life everlasting— 
the world would still be without form and void and 


7 





8 By Way of Introduction 


darkness would be upon the face of the deep. But 

because of those words—those “Texts That Made 

History’—there is sunlight on every shore! And 

thus, before the wondering eyes of each successive 

generation, the ancient drama of Creation is re- 

peated on a really imposing and majestic scale. 
FRANK W. BOREHAM. 

ARMADALE, 

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA. 
Christmas, 1925. 


I 
ALLEN GARDINER’S TEXT 


I 


ALLEN GARDINER never hesitated for a moment as 
to the choice of a profession. In those anxious and 
perilous days, with the country threatened by the 
horrors of a Napoleonic invasion, Lord Nelson was 
the idol and the hope of the nation. At that great 
sailor’s shrine, Allen offered the boyish hero-wor- 
ship of an intense and passionate nature. He was 
only eleven when England was stirred, as she had 
never been stirred before, by the news of Trafalgar 
—the dramatic victory of the fleet, the deliverance 
of the nation, and the hero’s glorious death. Every 
chord of the boy’s soul vibrated with the tense emo- 
tion of that tremendous day; and, within three years, 
he himself had entered the Navy. 

And here he is on H.M.S. Fortune! He has been 
a year at sea and has to-day received the heavy tid- 
ings of the death of his mother. The flood of recol- 
lection that surges through his mind on receipt of 
the news serves to emphasize the immensity of the 
chasm that yawns between the new life and the old 
one. In the early part of the nineteenth century the 
Navy was a brutalizing and demoralizing school 


9 


10 A Faggot of Torches 


for boys. But the black-edged letter sends Allen’s 
memory flying back across the years. He thinks of 
the quiet home in Berkshire; the walks in the woods 
by his father’s side and the evenings at the fireside 
with his mother. He is ashamed of the impatience 
with which he fretted to leave it all and get away 
to sea. 

But such sentiments quickly evaporate. The 
death of his mother makes him feel that the strong- » 
est tie that bound him to purity and goodness has 
now snapped: he is free to obey his wildest impulses 
and to follow the dictates of his own sweet will. 


II 


To the end of his life Commander Gardiner never 
cared to speak of the years that intervened between 
his fifteenth and his twenty-fifth. And yet some 
things happened in those days which his father re- 
counted to the neighbours with obvious pride. In > 
1814, at the age of twenty, Allen had distinguished 
himself in action and had been sent home in charge 
of a prize-ship. A few months later he was pro- 
moted to the rank of lieutenant; and other honours 
_ fell quickly upon him. But, when reminded of these 
achievements, the Captain used to shake his head. 
‘I spent those years,’ he would say, ‘amidst the 
headstrong excitements of youth’; and, although he 
believed himself to have been greatly forgiven, he 
could not find it in his heart to forgive himself. 

During those bitter years he heaped scorn and 


Allen Gardiner’s Text II 


derision on the faith of his childhood: with a gay 
and careless laugh he cut himself adrift from all the 
old moorings. To read the Bible, he averred, was 
an act of senseless folly. And yet, as his biographer 
is careful to point out, there are times in the midst 
of his gaiety when his better nature asserts itself. 
He himself has told us how, on one occasion, he re- 
solved to give the Bible another chance. But how is 
he to get one? With great trepidation he ap- 
proaches a bookseller’s shop. When he reaches the 
door, however, he sees other customers at the coun- 
ter. He cannot bear to be overheard asking for a 
Bible! He therefore paces the street, waiting for 
the shop to empty. But, as soon as one customer 
comes out, another goes in! At length he sees his 
chance; rushes in; buys the book; and spends the 
rest of the day wondering what the bookseller must 
think of him! Like the straw that tells which way 
the waters are moving, the incident is just enough 
to show that his father’s fervent petitions and his 
mother’s gentle entreaties are never quite at rest in 
the young sailor’s soul. But that is as far as it 
goes. For, away down in Berkshire, the old man 
hears of his son’s wayward and impetuous be- 
haviour; and hangs his head. Is thts the boy with 
whom, hand in hand, he walked across the fields? 
Is this the boy with whom he had so often kneeled 
in family worship? Such things are hard to under- 
stand. But, just as the mystery is deepening into 
impenetrable gloom, a letter arrives from Penang 


12 A Faggot of Torches 


which floods the old man’s path with sunshine. It 
is the letter in which Allen tells his father of his 
conversion! 

III . 

That conversion came about—as most conver- 
sions do—in the most unlikely and surprising way. 
Whilst H.M.S. Leander lies at anchor in the Straits 
of Malacca in 1820, a mail arrives from England 
which brings two letters for Lieut. Allen Gardiner. 
One, full of grave reproof, is from his father: it 
tells of the extreme anxiety that his son’s conduct 
is causing him. The other is from/an old lady, an 
intimate friend of his mother’s. Strange as it must 
seem, it is this letter that transforms everything. 
There is such a thing as Conversion by Corres- 
pondence: Bishop Hannington entered the King- 
dom of Heaven that way. So does Allen Gardiner. 
‘Nothing,’ as Miss Charlotte M. Yonge observes, 
‘nothing would have seemed more hopeless than the 
chance that a letter from a religious old lady would 
make an impression on a dashing young naval of- 
ficer; yet Allen Gardiner always considered the re- 
ceipt of that letter as the turning-point of his life.’ 
The letter begins apologetically: the writer cannot 
bear to seem censorious: not for worlds would she 
presume to lecture our young lieutenant. Yet, for 
his mother’s sake, she begs him to read with patience 
her earnest plea. She warns him of the deadening 
consequences of sin: she reminds him that it was to 
save man from sin that the Son of God lived and 


Allen Gardiner’s Text 13 


died: and she tells him that what he needs, above 
all else, is @ new heart. ‘Remember,’ she says, ‘this 
is not my phrase; it is the very word of Scripture. 
And unless we have this new heart, this clean heart, 
this heart of flesh given in exchange for a heart 
of stone, we cannot believe effectually.’ She quotes 
from David: Create in me a clean heart, O Lord, 
and from Ezekiel: A new heart will I give you. 
‘You will perhaps ask,’ she continues, ‘how this new 
heart can be obtained? It is the gift of God ex- 
clusively: none but He can create it.’ The letter 
throbs with the note of urgency. ‘Nothing that is 
unholy or impure,’ she says, ‘can enter heaven. 
The change spoken of by the Saviour: Ye must be 
born again, must take place while we live; for, as 
we are found in death, we shall for ever be: there is 
no repentance in the grave nor pardon offered to 
the dead.’ And she closes, as she began, on a per- 
sonal note. ‘It is probable, dear Allen, that you 
and I will never meet again on earth; and, if not, let 
me hope that we shall meet in that place where all 
must hope to be, clothed in the Saviour’s perfect 
righteousness.’ | 

Allen Gardiner reads the letter again and again 
and again. It seems more impressive and appealing 
with each perusal. He makes copies of it, one of 
which—together with a Bible that he bought at the 
time—he carries with him in all his subsequent 
voyages. 


4 A Faggot of Torches 


IV 


,A new heart! A new heart! 
A new heart will I give you! 
Create m me a clean heart, O God! 


Allen Gardiner’s new heart is no less high and no 
less brave than the old one; but it is more lowly, 
more penitent. As a light-hearted boy he longed to 
follow in the glorious footsteps of Lord Nelson; 
as a devout Christian he still aspires to serve where 
the perils are the thickest, where the hazards are the 
greatest and where the obstacles are most insuper- 
able. He will consecrate his nauti¢al skill to’ the 
most sublime ends! He will be the pioneer of the 
missionary! He will penetrate earth’s darkest con- 
tinents—Africa and South America—in order to 
open up a way for the Cross! He will be a har- 
binger and a pathfinder among the most barbarous 
and degraded races of mankind! 

And yet, whilst cherishing this audacious dream 
—a dream that ultimately cost him his life—he car- 
ries in his breast a very lowly and a very contrite 
heart. ‘The last time I visited this colony,’ he 
writes from South Africa, ‘I was walking in the 
broad way and hastening, by rapid strides, to the 
brink of eternal ruin. Blessed be His name who 
loved me and gave Himself for me, a great change 
has been wrought in my heart.’ And, at sea, a 
month later, he asks: ‘What return shall I make to 
the Lord for so unmerited a display of His good- 


~~ 
~*~, 


Allen Gardiner’s Text 5 


ness? After years of ingratitude, blasphemy, and 
rebellion, I have at last been melted! Alas, how 
slow and reluctant have I been to admit the heav- 
enly Guest who stood knocking without! Nor had 
He ever been received had not He Himself pre- 
pared the way!’ 

A new heart! A new heart! Was ever heart so 
high, so dauntless, so destitute of fear? Was ever 
heart so humble, so tender, so penitent? 


Vv 


A new heart! A new heart! 

Create mm me a clean heart, O God! 

Allen Gardiner’s new heart is no less stout, and 
no less stalwart, than the old one; but it is more 
unselfish, more pure. Jesus said that it is the pure 
in heart who see God; and certainly Allen Gardiner 
caught that beatific vision. 

As a small boy, eager to follow Nelson, he taught 
himself to endure hardship. Before retiring one 
night, his mother came, candle in hand, to Allen’s 
room to give her sleeping boy his good-night kiss. 
To her astonishment she found the bed undisturbed : 
it had not been occupied. Glancing round the room 
in alarm, she discovered Allen fast asleep on the 
floor. He explained next morning that he expected 
to live a rough life, with constant privations, and he 
wanted to get ready for it! 

In those early days he toughened his young 
sinews and accustomed his body to hardship in the 


16 A Faggot of Torches 


hope that, later on, he might win for himselt swift 
promotion, cover his name with the lustre of a fair 
renown, and, perhaps, die, like Nelson, in a blaze 
of glory. 

Later on, he is just as willing to endure hunger 
and thirst, discomfort and fatigue; but he is eager 
to suffer in silence and, if needs be, to die in 
obscurity. He thirsts neither for reward nor for 
fame. He endures as seeing Him who 1s invisible 
—the sublime prerogative of the pure-hearted. 
Taking the whole world as the sphere of his activ- 
ities, he pierces the interior of Africa and dares a 
thousand deaths among Hottentots, Kaffirs, Zulus, 
and Bushmen. We catch fitful glimpses of him, 
now intervening between hostile tribes; now under- 
taking a perilous march among mountains reputed 
to be impassable; and anon lying at the point of 
starvation among the reeds of the swampy river- 
bed, listening to the snorting and grunting of the 
hippopotami around him. At different stages of 
his adventurous career we find him at Tahiti, at 
Borneo, at Papua, at the most outlandish places; 
but ever with one end in view—to blaze a trail 
along which the missionary may bring to the most 
benighted the light of the everlasting gospel. He 
makes his way to the Falkland Islands, and, from 
that chilly outpost, looks wistfully across at the 
snow-capped and storm-swept coasts of Patagonia 
and Tierra del Fuego. ‘The Falkland Islands,’ 
says Miss Charlotte M. Yonge, ‘are dreary enough; 


Allen Gardiner’s Text 17 


but they are a paradise compared with that desolate 
fag-end of the Western world towards which Allen 
Gardiner now turned his face. Moreover, the 
Fuegians are as degraded a people as any on the 
face of the earth and are churlishly inhospitable to 
strangers. Still, to seek the most hopeless and un- 
cultivated was always Commander Gardiner’s ob- 
ject.” And so he sails into the blizzard; crosses the 
narrow stretch of snow-swept sea; and, with a 
smile on his fine face, goes to his tragic death! 
A new heart! A new heart! Was ever heart so 
valiant, so indomitable, so stout? Was ever heart 
so disinterested, so unselfish, so pure? 


vi 


A new heart ! A new heart! 

A new heart will I give you! 

Create in me a clean heart, O God! 

Allen Gardiner’s new heart is no less blithe, no 
less gay, than the old one; but it is more persistent, 
more patient. 

He literally died singing. The annals of adven- 
ture contain few records more pathetic than the 
story of those last dreadful weeks on the cruel 
coast. The heroes are seven in number. Their 
ship is disabled ; their powder is wet; their nets are 
torn to tatters by floating ice; their stores are ex- 
hausted. They are starving. John Badcock is 
the first to die; and he begs his companions to sing 
as his soul passes. One by one the others close their 


18 A Faggot of Torches 


eyes and yield their spirits back to God. Two only 
are left—Maidment and Gardiner. For a few days 
the captain is able to hobble, on a pair of roughly- 
fashioned crutches, to the cavern in which his com- 
rade lies: he himself is occupying an open boat on 
the beach. And then ! Nobody will ever know 
which of the two died first. 

The relief expedition found the two unburied 
bodies: Maidment’s in the cavern and Gardiner’s 
beside the boat: he was evidently too weak to clam- 
ber back into it. On the rocks, Gardiner—anxious 
that his friend should be found—had painted a 
hand pointing to the mouth of the cavern; and 
underneath, ‘Psalm Ixii, 5-8.’ The words are these: 

My soul, wait thou only upon God: for my 
expectation 1s from Him... . Trust in Him 
at all times, ye people; pour out your heart be- 
fore Him; God ts a refuge for us. 

Near by, the relief expedition found the priceless 
records that Allen Gardiner had written as he 
slowly died. As Mr. J. W. Marsh—the Command- 
er’s biographer—has pointed out, it is amazing that 
these precious relics still remained. “The tide ebbed 
and flowed, but it did no injury to those fragmentary 
memorials of these Christian martyrs. The spray 
dashed over them and left indelible stains; the rain 
poured down from above; the winds blew loud and 
strong; but a sleepless eye watched over them, an 
almighty hand protected them; and, in almost every 
case, the handwriting is still plain.’ 





Allen Gardiner’s Text 19 


Were ever such memorials? Every sentence vi- 
brates with jubilant triumph. Again and again he 
breaks into poetry. ‘Although,’ he sings, 

Although my daily bread has failed, 
I know from whence it came; 
And still His faithful promises 
Are every day the same; 
His words the same for evermore 
As when they first were given; 
Yea, blessed thought! they cannot fail 
Though earth dissolve and heaven! 


On the day that precedes his death, he assures 
us that, though four days without food, he has no 
sensation of hunger. And here are the last sen- 
tences he ever penned: 

Yet a little while, and through grace we shall join 
that blessed throng to sing the praises of Christ 
throughout eternity. I neither hunger nor thirst 
though five days without food! Marvellous kind- 
ness to me—a sinner! 

A new heart! A new heart! Was ever heart so 
joyful, so blithe, so invincibly gay? Was ever heart 
so unconquerable, so unrepining, so patient ? 


VII 
In all his last writings, he begs, with pathetic reit- 
eration, that the work may be vigilantly prosecuted 
until Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego have been 
completely won for Christ. His wish was respected. 
Years afterwards Charles Darwin—most dispas- 
sionate of witnesses—declared that the transfor- 


20 A Faggot of Torches 


mation effected in Tierra del Fuego was the bright- 
est trophy that Christianity had won, and he liber- 
ally supported the continuance of the work. The 
letter that an old lady wrote to a young lieutenant 
at Penang led, not only to the salvation of his own 
soul, but to the illumination of half a continent. 


II 
AUGUSTUS TOPLADY’S TEXT 


I 


ENGLISH soil is haunted. Go where you will, the 
most glorious ghosts glide out from the silences and 
startle you. In visiting the Homeland recently, I 
vaguely expected to confront these splendid spectres 
in the cities: but I was scarcely prepared to find 
them moving in broad daylight among the ploughed 
fields, the fragrant hedgerows and the drowsy ham- 
lets of the countryside. Yet there they were! I 
met them on the Essex wolds; on the Norfolk 
broads; on the Salisbury plains; on the Sussex 
downs; on the Devonshire moors; and on the village 
greens of Kent. I met them among the picturesque 
peaks and the idyllic waters of Cumberland and 
Westmorland; among the Surrey hills; among the 
Yorkshire fells, and among the lochs and tros- 
sachs of Scotland. I came upon them everywhere. 
One such experience holds my memory in thrall 
to-day. 

It was a beautiful morning in August; we were 
staying at a little town in Devonshire; and, after 
breakfast, our host made a suggestion which was 
altogether to our taste. 

21 


22 A Faggot of Torches 


‘It’s a shame to stay indoors,’ he observed; ‘how 
would you like to see some of our Devonshire lanes 
and perhaps look round a village or two?’ 

And so it came about that, an hour later, we were 
making our way up hill and down dale through 
scenery of the most bewitching loveliness. The 
lanes are so narrow that we speculate as to what 
will happen if we chance to meet another car; and 
so tortuous that we spend half our time tooting for 
the admonition of drivers who never appear. At 
times the little car seems buried in mountains of 
hedgerow. Then, as we emerge from the dense se- 
clusion of a noble avenue of beeches, or reach the 
summit of some gentle knoll, we pause to survey the 
panorama of field and farm, woodland and stream, 
spread out before us, and inquire the names of the 
sequestered villages nestling in the hollows. The 
red kine, standing amidst the rich grass that rises 
to their dewlaps, stare lazily round at us as we 
drink in the beauty of the landscape. 

All at once, at a lonely spot where two roads 
meet, we come upon a wayside memorial. We alight 
to read the inscription. To our astonishment we 
discover that this tall column—rising from the grass 
of the roadside—is a monument to John Coleridge 
Patteson, the martyr-Bishop of the South Seas! 
And why should the memorial to so heroic a soul, 
with whose text I have dealt in a later chapter of 
‘this book, stand in this charming but outlandish 
spot? The question is soon answered. For, in his 


Augustus Toplady’s Text 23 


early days, Patteson lived here! In this delightful 
district some of the happiest hours of his childhood 
were spent. Before we returned from that memor- 
able drive, we inspected the home of his boyhood; 
and, a day or two later, we motored along this self- 
same road as far as Exeter Cathedral—in which he 
was ordained—and admired the handsome Mar- 
tyr’s Pulpit which has been placed there to his illus- 
trious memory. But we have wandered from the 
wayside column at which we alighted. Reentering 
the car, we slip along the lane to Ottery St. Mary, 
the home of Coleridge, and glance at Hayes Farm, 
the birthplace of Sir Walter Raleigh. 

John Coleridge Patteson! 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge! 

Sir Walter Raleigh! 
What glorious ghosts are we meeting in the course 
of this casual drive of ours! Yet it was of none of 
these that I set out to write. For, in the course of 
that morning spin, we came upon the pretty little 
village of Broadhembury. A photograph of the 
dreamy old hamlet lies before me at this moment. 
If, on the face of God’s earth, there is anywhere a 
more peaceful and picturesque place than Broad- 
hembury, I should dearly love to be taken to it. A 
single street of little thatched cottages; none of the 
walls quite upright; none of the thatched roofs quite 
regular; none of the eaves quite level. Each cot- 
tage has its porch; each porch juts out on to the 
roadway (for Broadhembury would regard foot- 


24 A Faggot of Torches 


paths or pavements as a newfangled and senseless 
affectation); and each porch and cottage-wall is 
splashed with irregular and straggling patches of 
ivy, rambler roses, and sweet briar. I almost apol- 
ogized to Broadhembury for bursting upon its tran- 
quillity in a motor-car. A motor-car in Broadhem- 
bury is an anachronism, almost a sacrilege. It is 
the clashing of two separate ages: it is the invasion 
of the world of repose by the world of hustle and 
noise. At the end of this cluster of old-fashioned 
habitations stands the village church, its noble tower 
rising grandly above its ancestral yews. And it 
was when we entered the church that we discov- 
ered that, like all the other villages, Broadhembury 
is haunted. The radiant spirit that we there en- 
countered shed a new glory on the village we had 
just explored. 


II 


For, on the church wall, we found a tablet. How 
little we dreamed, when we set out on our morning | 
drive, to find this stately phantom along one of these 
Devonshire lanes! Yet here it is! And here it is, 
too, in the actual setting with which, in other days, 
it was familiar—and this is the inscription that we 
read : 


Augustus Toplady’s Text 25 


IN GRATEFUL MEMORY OF 


AUGUSTUS MONTAGU TOPLADY, B.A., 


VICAR.OF THIS PARISH FROM 1768 To 1778, AND AUTHOR 
OF THE IMMORTAL HYMN: 


Rock of Ages, cleft for me, 

Let me hide myself in Thee; 

Let the water and the blood, 

From Thy riven side which flowed, 
Be of sin the double cure— 

Cleanse me from its guilt and power. 


TO WHOSE PERSONAL PIETY, BRILLIANT GIFTS, SANCTIFIED 

LEARNING AND UNCOMPROMISING ADVOCACY OF THE 

GOSPEL OF THE SOVEREIGN GRACE OF GOD, HIS WRITINGS 
BEAR ABUNDANT TESTIMONY 


THIS: TABLET 


IS ERECTED A.D. 1898, BEING I20 YEARS AFTER HE ENTERED 
INTO THE JOY OF HIS LORD ON THE IITH AUGUST, 1778, IN 
THE THIRTY-EIGHTH YEAR OF HIS AGE. 


For by grace are ye saved through faith: not of works, 
lest any man should boast. 





In the course of a century and a half, the rest of 
the world may have changed; but Broadhembury has 
made no effort to keep pace with those feverish 
fluctuations. ‘If,’ says Mr. Thomas Wright, Top- 
lady’s biographer, ‘if Toplady could revisit the vil- 
lage, he would recognize the cottages with their 
white cob walls and mouse-coloured thatch roofs; 
the churchyard wall—also of cob and also mouse- 
coloured; and the immemorial*yew that casts its 
shadows over mounds and tombstones.’ 


26 A Faggot of Torches 


Leaving the church—a little regretfully—we 
saunter once more through the village, trying to 
conjure up the figure of Augustus Toplady visiting 
from door to door—always with the priceless words 
of life everlasting upon his earnest lips; and then, 
re-entering the car, we set out over the hills for 
home. The outline of that exquisite slice of coun- 
tryside is easily remembered. For, as Mr. Wright 
says again, “whatever pictures fade from the mind 
of the visitor to Broadhembury, he will not lose the 
recollection of that great rounded height—Blackbutt 
Hill, a bastion of Blackdown—which, in Toplady’s 
mind, blazed with the yellow of the gorse and the 
amethyst of the heather, and on which, even to-day, 
although parts of the upland have been planted, 
wild Nature gorgeously asserts herself.’ Amidst 
such natural and historic enchantments we returned 
from an outing that had taught us that even the 
sticks and stones along the hedgerows of England 
are saturated with the most golden and the most 
sacred romance. 


III 


Memory strings her pearls upon a chain. One 
pleasing recollection swiftly summons another to the 
mind. The story of our drive in Devonshire re- 
minds me of another drive—in Surrey this time. 
For, in the course of that tour over the Surrey hills, 
we visited Farnham; and it was at Farnham that 
Augustus Toplady was born. Farnham commem- 


Augustus Toplady’s Text 247 


orates that interesting circumstance by singing a 
verse of Rock of Ages at the Parish Church every 
Sunday evening. Six months before Augustus Top- 
lady came into the world, his father left it; and the 
boy was therefore reared entirely by his mother. 
Gentle, unselfish, and devout, the good woman 
made the training of her boy the supreme business 
of her life; and he—frail, thoughtful, and plastic 
—responded to every uplifting influence that she 
brought to bear upon him. Yet, during his quiet 
and uneventful boyhood his faith consisted in a 
placid assent to the truths that his mother taught 
him rather than in any profound and attached con- 
victions of his own. 

Then comes a sudden change! At the age of six- 
teen he goes with his mother to visit her estate at 
Codymain, Wexford, Ireland. Near to the place 
at which they are staying, a man named James Mor- 
ris is preaching in a barn. Augustus Toplady is 
captivated by the novelty of so irregular a proceed- 
ing; and, prompted mainly by curiosity, resolves to 
give the missioner a hearing. He goes. That night, 
the record says, the preacher seemed inspired. He 
took for his text the words: Ye who sometimes were 
far off were made nigh by the blood of Christ. Top- 
lady—young and impressionable—was transported, 
carried beyond himself. ‘Under that sermon,’ he 
himself tells us, ‘under that sermon I was, I trust, 
brought nigh by the blood of Christ. Strange that 
I, who had so long sat under the means of grace in 


28 A Faggot of Torches 


England, should be brought nigh by the blood of 
Chnst in an obscure part of Ireland, amidst a hand- 
ful of God’s people met together in a barn, and 
under the ministry of one who could hardly spell 
his own name. I shall. remember that day to all 
eternity.’ This was in August, 1756. 

I like to shut my eyes and recall those two drives 
—the visit to Farnham in Surrey and the visit to 
Broadhembury in Devonshire. For here, at Farn- 
ham, I seem to see the fountainhead of that ever- 
broadening stream which, at the close of his min- 
istry at Broadhembury poured itself into the infi- 
nite sea. It was in his Farnham days that Augustus 
Toplady strode out upon that spiritual pilgrimage 
which, lasting only two and twenty years, made him 
one of the most potent and effective forces in the 
evangelization of England. 

But, midway between his Surrey days and his 
Devonshire days, an experience befell him that the 
world will remember long after his connexion with 
Farnham and Broadhembury is forgotten. And 
that reminds me of another drive. 


IV 


We were at Wells in Somerset; and, after visit- 
_ ing the Cathedral, we set out for Cheddar, motor- 
ing some distance up the George. Now it was in 
this charming and romantic Mendip country—at 
Burrington Combe—that the greatest of all our 
hymns was born in the soul of Augustus Toplady. 


Augustus Toplady’s Text 29 


Was there ever such a storm? How the light-_ 
ning rent the skies! How the thunder rolled and 
reverberated along those wild and rocky combes, 
defiles, and gorges! The whole valley is a place of 
solemn grandeur. The hills tower to a consider- 
able height on either side, and out from their grassy 
yet precipitous slopes there project vast masses of 
jagged rock. In this weird place, Augustus Top- 
lady—then curate-in-charge at Blagdon—was 
caught that stormy afternoon. As the black clouds 
gathered in preparation for the impending deluge, 
he cast his eyes anxiously about him and noticed a 
pair of huge limestone crags that, leaning against 
each other, seemed to have become one. In the cav- 
ity between them, Toplady took refuge; and, shel- 
tering there, watched the violence of the elements. 

His thoughts wandered back to that unforgetta- 
ble experience in Ireland—the cavernous barn—the 
uncouth preacher—and the text! Ye who some- 
times were far off were made nigh by the blood of 
Christ. 

Far off! It seemed to him that, in those days, he 
was far off, a long way from home, lost in the storm! 

Made nigh! It seemed to him that, as a result of 
that memorable transformation, he had been drawn 
near, gathered in, and given shelter from the wrath 
that threatened. 

Made migh by the blood of Christ! The rock in 
which he had found refuge was a cleft rock! It 
was only in the breaking of that holy Body, and 


30 A Faggot of Torches 


the shedding of that sacred Blood, that he had 
found shelter and satisfaction. 

The thought captivated him: he could not shake 
it off. All the way home he thought of the rock— 
the rock in which he had sheltered in Burrington 
Combe—the Rock in which his soul had found ref- 
uge ten years earlier, And, sitting down, he wrote: 


Rock of Ages, cleft for me, 

Let me hide myself in Thee! 

Let the water and the blood 

From Thy wounded side which flowed, 
Be of sin the double cure; 

Cleanse me from its guilt and power. 


Mr. Gladstone thought it the greatest hymn ever 
written in any language, and he translated it into 
Latin, Greek, and Italian. No other hymn has 
taken so firm a hold of the hearts of men. In the 
sweep of its melody, thousands of storm-tossed 
hearts have found refuge in the Rock of Ages. 


Vv 


Professor George Jackson wishes that poor old 
Dr. Samuel Johnson could have sat at the feet of 
Augustus Toplady. The Professor is dealing with 
a stupendous problem. ‘Was John Ruskin wrong,’ 
he asks, “when he said that “the root of almost 
every schism and heresy from which the Christian 
Church has ever suffered has been the effort of man 
to earn rather than receive his salvation?’ Once 
you take that view,’ Professor Jackson continues, 
‘you are back again in the old, dreary mill-horse 


Augustus Toplady’s Text 31 


round against which Luther’s Reformation and 
Wesley’s Revival were the protest, the protest of 
souls that knew themselves defrauded of their in- 
heritance in Christ.’ By way of illustration, the 
Professor cites Dr. Johnson. He has been reading 
Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations. ‘It is,’ he says, 
‘a strangely moving little book. Can anyone read 
it and not be touched to the quick by the great, sad 
sincerity of soul which breathes through its every 
page, and at the same time without a sigh of regret 
that there was not some one at hand who could have 
shown to Johnson a more excellent way? If only 
Toplady could have taught him to sing 


Nothing in my hand I bring, 
Simply to Thy cross I cling, 


what a difference it might have made! Religion 
would have been a bridge instead of a burden, some- 
thing to carry him instead of something for him to 
carry.’ This, as the tablet at Broadhembury testi- 
fies, was Toplady’s gospel; and, by means of his 
hymn, he still preaches that gospel to the hearts of 
millions. 
VI 

Toplady was only thirty-seven when he died. He 
called for his Bible and himself selected the verses 
that were to be read to him. J am persuaded that 
neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principal- 
ities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to 
come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other crea- 


32 A Faggot of Torches 


ture, shall be able to separate us from the love. of 
God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. He was 
still sheltering in the rock—the Rock of Ages— 
and even in that last fierce storm—the storm in the 
Vale that is lonelier than Burrington Combe—his 
soul’s sure refuge did not fail him. 


Ill 
THOMAS CARLYLE’S* TEXT 


I 


THE interest that we feel in Carlyle is the interest 
that we feel in Vesuvius. Other great men are like 
great mountains; they leap from the common plane 
and stand out with grandeur and ruggedness against 
the horizon; but Carlyle is essentially volcanic. His 
personality is awe-inspiring; his temperament is 
fiery; his utterance is like a turgid flow of lava. He 
holds for us the fascination that attaches to all 
things that are terrible, weird, explosive. He takes 
knowing. The reader who picks up Sartor Resartus 
or The French Revolution for the first time feels 
that he is crossing a ploughed field in silk slippers. 
The going is hard and the gait ungraceful; but 
there is novelty in it; and, after a while, he gets 
accustomed to the rough track and begins to enjoy 
the smell of the upturned soil and the tang of the 
bracing air. The geologists have taught us that the 
world is all the better and the safer for having a few 
volcanoes; and it is certainly the better for having 
men of the type of Thomas Carlyle. 

Carlyle stands, and stands conspicuously, among 
the prophets of the ages. He was, as Edmond 
Scherer, the French scholar, declares, the Prophet 
of Sincerity. Truth was his passion. He was tre- 

33 


34 A Faggot of Torches 


mendously in earnest. ‘Carlyle is no homceopath- 
ist,’ said Mazzini, the Italian patriot; “he never ad- 
ministers remedies for evil in infinitesimal doses; 
he never pollutes the sacredness of thought by out- 
ward concesson or compromise with error. Like 
Luther, he hurls his inkstand at the devil without 
looking to the consequences; but he does it with 
such sincerity that the devil himself could not be 
displeased at it were the moment not critical and 
every blow of the inkstand a serious thing to him.’ 
There, then, stands your nineteenth-century prophet, 
not greatly dissimilar from the prophets of an earlier 
age—Elijah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist! ‘No 
prophet,’ says Mr. Maclean Watt, ‘ever gripped and 
shook his generation with such a horny hand and 
such a grasp invincible.’ Mr. Watt contrasts Car- 
lyle with Ruskin. ‘Ruskin approaches all his themes 
as if in broadcloth and with his gloves on; but the 
rugged Scotsman walks out with his budget of 
kingly truths, and, no matter what clothing he 
wears, you feel the homespun and naked grip of a 
strong man’s influence.’ 

When Carlyle was an old man of eighty, Lord 
Beaconsfield, in the Queen’s name, offered him a 
peerage and an income capable of maintaining its 
rank and dignity. Such a distinction had never 
before been offered to any man of letters, and 
Carlyle was not unmindful of the honour done 
him. But he shook his shaggy old head. A 
prophet with a peerage and a lordly pension! 


Thomas Carlyle’s Text 35 


“Very proper of the Queen to offer it,’ observed 
a London bus-conductor to James Anthony Froude 
next day, “and more proper of he to say that he 
would have nothing to do with it. ’Tain’t the 
likes of they who can do honour to the likes of he!’ 

Froude agreed with the conductor. ‘Yet,’ he 
adds, ‘the country was saved by that offer from 
the reproach of coming centuries, when Carlyle will 
stand among his contemporaries as Socrates stands 
among the Athenians, the one pre-eminently wise 
man to whom all the rest are nothing.’ Lord Mor- 
ley goes a step further. ‘He is,’ that eminent au- 
thority declares, ‘not only one of the foremost lit- 
erary figures of his own time, which is a compara- 
tively small thing, but one of the greatest moral 
forces of all time.’ 

The Prophet of Sincerity! says Scherer. 

The most powerful teacher of righteousness and 
truth that his generation knew, says Mr. Maclean 
Watt. 

The one pre-eminenily wise man of his time, says 
Froude. 

One of the greatest moral forces of all time, says 
Lord Morley. 

How, I wonder, and when, and where was that 
stupendous power generated? By what agency and 
instrumentality was our Prophet of Sincerity called 
to his prophetic office? The matter is worth inves- 
tigating. 


36 A Faggot of Torches 


II 


When he died, a grave in Westminster Abbey was 
offered, and, like the peerage and the pension, de- 
clined. He had begged that he might be buried be- 
side his father and mother in the old churchyard at 
Ecclefechan by the Solway. Those who know the 
story of his life know why. Beneath that stern and 
rugged surface, there was a deep, rich vein of hu- 
man tenderness. All through the years it found ex- 
pression in his letters to his father and mother. He 
felt that he owed everything to them. Was he the 
prophet of honesty, sincerity, truth? It was his 
father who made him so. His father was a stone- 
mason. He built the house in which his famous 
son was born, and many of the other dwellings along 
that Scottish countryside. 

‘Nothing that he undertook to do but he did it 
faithfully and like a true man,’ says the sage. ‘I 
still look on the houses that he built with a certain 
proud interest. They stand firm and sound to the 
heart all over his little district. No one that comes 
after him will ever be able to sneer at them as the 
handiwork of a hollow eye-servant.’ 

At the height of his fame, Carlyle loved to recall 
the simple but stately phrases that he had heard his 
father use at evening worship in the old Dumfries- 
shire cottage. The majestic music of those prayers 
haunted his ear to his dying day. The honest stone- 
mason had very little money and very many children, 


7 


Thomas Carlyle’s Text 37 


but it was his dream that Thomas should go to the 
university and be a minister. So, very early, one 
cold November morning, Thomas set out on his 
long eighty-mile trudge to Edinburgh. His father 
and mother walked a mile or two with him. To the 
end of his days there was always a moistening of the 
eyes when he spoke of two things. The first was 
his father’s eagerness to work early and late, to 
pinch and stint and save, in order that Thomas 
might enjoy advantages to which his father had 
never aspired. ‘With a noble faith,’ says Thomas, 
‘he launched me forth into a world which himself 
had never been permitted to visit.’ The second was 
the dumb, unmurmuring but bitter disappointment 
of the father when the son told him that he had 
resolved, after all, not to become a minister. ‘Car- 
lyle never forgot his father’s respectful acceptance 
of his decision, and he knew, too, that the disap- 
pointment was an abiding sorrow to his mother.’ 

His mother! The most beautiful things that Car- 
lyle ever wrote, were the letters that he addressed 
to that mother of his. ‘I have shifted my writing- 
table,’ he says, in one of them, ‘and now, every time 
I look up, your affectionate, sorrowing face looks 
down on me from the picture-frame above the man- 
telpiece. It has a sorrow in it, that face, which 
goes to my very heart. But it is not to be called a 
mere sorrow either; it is a noble weariness rather, as 
of much work done. I will wish all men and all 
women such a sorrow.’ 


38 A Faggot of Torches 


“Good Mother!’ he says, in writing to his brother ; 
‘she is quite cheery yet; looks back with still resig- 
nation on many a sorrow and forward with humble 
pious trust. It is beautiful to see how, in the grad- 
ual decay of all other strength, the strength of her 
heart and affection still survives fresher than ever. 
The soul refuses to grow old with the body—one of 
the most affecting sights.’ 

It was from his mother’s lips that he learned his 
text. It was first of all her text. I seem to see the 
barefooted, tousle-headed Scottish laddie sitting on 
the little stool before the crackling fire in that mod- 
est little cottage in the Vale of Arran whilst the good 
woman spells the great words out to him: We know 
that all things work together for good to them that 
love God. She tells him how, not once nor twice, 
but over and over again, she has tested them and 
found them true. That golden word became the one 
serene confidence of his stormy heart; and, in his 
works and correspondence, it occurs repeatedly. 
The early years of his literary life were all spent 
among the mosshags of Craigenputtock. Oh, those 
weary years at Craigenputtock! The house on the 
moorland—which Froude describes as the dreariest 
spot in the British dominions—became to him a 
place of ‘lying draggletails of byre-woman; peat- 
moss and isolation; exasperation and confusion.’ 
He wrote on and on, but to no apparent purpose, 
only one voice—a woman’s—constantly encourag- 
ing him. ‘It is twenty-three months,’ he complains, 


Thomas Carlyle’s Text 39 


‘since I earned a penny by the craft of literature. 
Providence warns me to have done with it. I have 
failed in the Divine Eternal Universe.’ Yet, all 
the while, he was writing what he knew the world 
needed to read. The prophet soul blazed within him. 
Sartor Resartus had gone off like a damp squib, 
and been ridiculed as clotted nonsense. The French 
Revolution was ready for the printer. ‘What they 
will do with this book, no one knows, my Jeanie 
lass, but they have not had for two hundred years 
any book that came more truly from a man’s very 
heart, so let them trample it under foot and hoof 
as they see best!’ Then he made his big plunge— 
‘one of the biggest plunges that a man can take.’ 
He felt the lure of London and resolved to fling him- 
self into its tumult. In that hour of crises he threw 
all his weight on his mother’s text, the text that he 
had made his own. We know that all things work to- 
gether for good to them that love God. He quotes 
the text—his mother’s text and his—in a letter to 
his brother. And when he heard that his mother 
was in deep distress because one of her boys, Mick, 
had emigrated and settled across the Atlantic, he 
sent her her own text to comfort her. He tried to 
pour back into her heavy heart the solace which 
she had, first of all, communicated to his. “You 
have had much to suffer, dear mother,’ he writes, 
‘and are grown old in the Valley of Tears; but you 
always say, as all of us should say, “Have we not 
many mercies, too?” Is there not above all, and in 


40 A Faggot of Torches 


all, a Father watching over us, through whom all 
sorrows shall yet work together for good? Yes, it 
is even so. Let us try to hold by that as an anchor 
most sure and stead fast!’ 

When Carlyle’s father died, the daughter wrote 
letters in which the other members of the family 
were acquainted with their loss. But the mother in- 
sisted on adding a postscript. ‘It is God that has 
done it; be still, my dear children! There was the 
fountainhead of Carlyle’s faith—a faith that he 
propagated in every page that he penned. ‘Man 1s- 
sues from Eternity,’ he writes, ‘is encompassed by 
Eternity, and again in Eternity disappears. It is 
fearful and wonderful. This only we know, that 
God is above it, that God made it, and that God rules 
it for good.’ 

For we know that all things work together for 
‘good. to them that love God. 

It was Bernard Gilpin’s text. Bernard Gilpin was 
sentenced, under Queen Mary, to die for his faith. 
During his imprisonment he repeated the text morn- 
ing, noon and night. We know that all things work 
together for good to them that love God. On his 
way to execution he fell and broke his leg. He was 
ordered back to prison, and, whilst he moaned in 
pain, the gaoler twitted him with his text. ‘Ah,’ 
the good man replied, ‘but it’s true all the same! It’s 
all working together for good! And it was, for 
whilst he lay there, Mary died, Elizabeth ascended 
the throne, and Bernard Gilpin was set at liberty. 


Thomas Carlyle’s Text 4I 


Il 
We know! 


Carlyle found rare music in those two syllables. 
By a skilful operation, Lord Lister once saved the 
life of W. E. Henley. In expressing his gratitude 
to the great surgeon, Henley says that ‘his wise, 
rare smile is sweet with certainties.’ ‘I heard,’ says 
another poet, 


I heard a bird at break of day, 
Sing from the autumn trees 

A song so mystical and calm, 
’Twas full of certainties! 


Lister’s smile was sweet with certainties; the 
bird’s song was full of certainties; so was the soul 
of Thomas Carlyle. We know, he said, we know! 
Thomas Carlyle was very sure of God. He was 
never in his life more hurt than when Sir James 
Stephen charged him with unbelief. It was in 1853. 
‘You must have the goodness to expunge the phrase,’ 
he retorted. ‘I have merely said that no man ought 
to affirm what he does not himself completely be- 
lieve. My own creed is not one of scepticism or 
doubt; but, for these thirty years, it has been a cer- 
tainty with me, for which I am, ang ought to be, for 
ever thankful to the Maker of me.’ 

And the source of that certainty? Carlyle thought 
of the old scenes by the Solway fireside. “In the 
poorest cottages,’ he said, ‘are books—is one book, 
a noble book, wherein for several thousands of years, 
the spirit of man has found light and nourishment 


42 A Faggot of Torches 


and an interpreting response to whatever is deepest 
in him; wherein still, to this day, for the eye that 
will look well, the Mystery of Existence reflects 
itself, if not to the satisfying of the outward sense, 
yet to the opening of the inward sense, which is the 
far grander result.’ 

We know!—‘my creed is a certainty with me.’ 

We know that all things work together for good 
to them that love God. 

IV 

If ever a man’s text was put to the test, Carlyle’s 
was. He devoted his life to the study of history. 
He saw all things working. But he saw a harmony 
in their working: he was convinced that all things 
were working together. And he saw an aim, a pur- 
pose, a goal in their working: history was not the 
chance product of blind forces. <All things were 
working together for good! His mother said so; his 
Bible said so; and his lifelong experience, fortified by 
industrious researches, proved to his complete sat- 
isfaction that the shining words were true. He 
clung to that buoyant conviction as long as he lived, 
and, in some way or other, affirmed it in every vol- 
ume that he wrote. Many of his contemporaries 
marvelled at his confidence; but, even if they did not 
share it, they respected it. And those who knew 
him intimately, and were honoured by his conver- 
sation or correspondence, were impressed by his 
faith in his text at every turn. In his letters to 
Emerson he refers repeatedly to the all-enfolding, 


Thomas Carlyle’s Text 43 


all-controlling goodness of God. In one of them, 
written when Emerson was crushed with sorrow, 
Carlyle tells him that ‘there are blessings which, like 
sungleams in wild weather, make this rough life 
beautiful with rainbows, showing that there is a 
Sun, and a General Heart of Goodness, behind all 
that happens, for which let us be thankful ever- 
more!’ ‘We know that God is good,’ he says again, 
and he tells Emerson of his mother’s faith. ‘ “They 
cannot take God’s providence from thee,” she used 
to say, “thou hast never wanted yet”.’ 

On his forty-ninth birthday I find him writing — 
one of his lovely letters to that wonderful mother of 
his. ‘This time nine and forty years ago,’ he says, 
‘I was a small infant a few hours old, lying, uncon- 
scious, in your kind bosom, you piously rejoicing 
over me—appointed to love me while life lasted to 
us both. Surely, we may both say, as the old He- 
brews devotedly did, Hitherto hath the Lord helped 
us! Yes, for all our sorrows and difficulties, we 
have not been without help, neither shall we be.’ 

And, in one of his last letters, he tells his friend, 
Erskine of Linlathen, of the comfort he finds, on 
sleepless nights, in meditating on the Fatherly love 
of God. 

Before me, as I write, there stands a picture by 
Mr. John R. Skelton, of which I am very fond. It 
represents Carlyle and Tennyson sitting together on 
the lawn at Chelsea. On most things they were 
pretty much of one mind. ‘If,’ says Tennyson, 


44 A Faggot of Torches 


‘Tf e’er when faith had fall’n asleep, 
I heard a voice “believe no more” 


And heard an ever-breaking shore 
That tumbled in the Godless deep; 


A warmth within the breast would melt 
The freezing reason’s colder part, 
And like a man in wrath the heart 

Stood up and answer’d “J have feli.’’ 

That was Carlyle’s faith exactly. He had felt. 
“What can books and arguments matter to you or 
me?’ cried Catherine Elsmere to Robert, when his 
faith was failing him, ‘have we not known and felt 
Him as He is?—have we not, Robert? Come!’ 

There is no argument like the argument of expe- 
rience. ‘I have felt,’ says Tennyson. ‘We have 
known and felt, cries Catherine Elsmere. In the 
old home by the Solway, Carlyle’s mother led her 
son into a profound experience of the changeless love 
of Christ and the eternal goodness of God. It be- 
came, as he said, a certainty to him—the one sweet- 
ening influence in a singularly stormy career. For, 
through cloud and through sunshine, he knew be- 
yond the shadow of a doubt that all things work 
together for good to them that love God; and his 
troubled heart rested serenely there. | 


IV 
ROBERT FULLER’S TEXT 


I 


‘Then does this mean that you’ve been converted 
again?’ asked poor Clem, in uttermost dismay. 

That was the trouble with Robert Fuller: he was 
converted so often! In her Green Apple Harvest, 
Sheila Kaye-Smith tells in vivid detail the stirring 
story of his three conversions. His first conversion 
was like apple-blossom, filmy and light; it soon came 
fluttering to the ground. His second conversion 
was like green apples, sour and hard; it set every- 
body’s teeth on edge. His third conversion was like 
ripe fruit, rosy and sweet; the reader closes the 
book with the taste of it still in his mouth. But 
Clem did not know how good that third conversion 
was when, in pardonable alarm, he asked his anxious 
question. 

Robert and Clem were the sons of James Fuller, a 
Sussex farmer. Their father was very religious— 
in his way. It was an ugly way: his wife and chil- 
dren were often terrified by it. Our first glimpse of 
him is characteristic. There is to be a revival serv- 
ice at the chapel: James is determined that his boys 

45 


46 A Faggot of Torches 


shall attend it. But, to his chagrin and vexation, 
they have not yet come home to tea. He suspects 
that they are deliberately delaying their return in 
order that they may evade the service. He declares 
that they shall go, even if they go without their tea. 
His fury is intensified by the secret conviction that 
this course would only be possible in the case of 
Clem. Clem is gentle and yielding, and a tremen- 
dous admirer of his big and burly brother. But 
Robert is massive and handsome and _ reckless. 
‘Robert is grown up, twenty-two at Michaelmas, 
and for five years at least his father has been incap- 
able of making him do anything he did not like. 
Clem he can still force a bit, for Clem 1s only seven- 
teen and vulnerable. But he does not care so much 
about Clem, whose docility has never challenged his 
own weakness. It is that big, heavy, bounding Rob- 
ert—all health and sin—whom James Fuller would 
like to subdue. Sometimes in dreams he takes it 
out of Robert.’ But only in dreams. 


II 


The boys arrived in time, after all. Robert had 
been drinking at the village inn. Clem had been 
sweethearting with Polly. Robert reached home 
first. The outer door crashed open; someone shouted 
at the cat; and then the kitchen door burst in with 
similar violence. ‘He looked older than his years. 
His face was florid and there was a little dark mous- 
tache on his upper lip, shading without hiding the 


Robert Fuller’s Text 47 


full curves of his mouth. His eyes were blue, and 
also rather full; his hair was dark and carefully 
oiled. He was dressed after the manner of the ex- 
quisites of the district—in a fawn coat and checked 
riding breeches, with leather gaiters and boots.’ 
He had imbibed at the bar just enough liquor to 
make him lively. He sang hymns over his tea. His 
father stormed at him and accused him of blas- 
phemy; but Robert protested that he was singing 
the hymns from his heart. As, in all probability, 
he was. Robert was a child of impulse. 

‘Turn, sinners, turn to Me!’ cried the preacher. 
Clem was wishing himself out in the lane with Polly, 
and, wishing it, fell asleep. Robert, on the contrary, 
leaned forward in his seat, drinking in every word. 
He sat with his eyes fixed on the preacher’s face, his 
jaw dropping towards his flashing tie, a few beads 
of sweat on his forehead. 

‘Now, brothers and sisters,’ said the missioner, 
‘before [ sit down there is something I should like to 
ask of you. Will those who have felt the grace of 
God in their souls stand up and be witnesses to the 
congregation?’ 

Clem, wide awake by this time and feeling miser- 
ably ashamed of himself’ for having slumbered, no- 
ticed one or two people slowly rise. Then, glancing 
round, he was utterly dumbfounded at seeing Rob- 
ert on his feet! ‘There he stood—a great hulking, 
strapping creature—the most conspicuous object in 
the room, in his fancy waistcoat and check breeches! 


48 A Faggot of Torches 


His face was crimson and he looked half dazed. 
Clem felt a thrill go down his backbone. Robert 
was saved! Robert was a believer—he who had 
been brought home drunk only a week ago!’ Clem 
could scarcely believe his eyes. Robert, who loved 
to play crown and anchor at the public-house and to 
swagger through the village on market nights with 
a girl on his arm, standing there to show that he 
was converted! Oh, how Clem wished that he had 
listened to the sermon and heard what it was that 
had so powerfully moved Robert’s heart! He felt 
proud of Robert standing there among the elect. 

Clem was quite alone, however, in his admiration. 
Others were suspicious or critical or angry. On his 
return from the chapel, the family received Robert 
frigidly, and his father called him a fool. ‘You're 
that,’ he said, ‘if you’re not worse!’ 

Such treatment set up a violent reaction in Rob- 
ert’s impulsive breast. He felt that he had been 
victimized; and he felt, strangely enough, that God 
was to blame for it. 

‘I tell you, Clem,’ he said, as they sat on their 
beds discussing the incident that night. ‘T tell you 
that it was God that spoke to me. He’s played me 
a trick. He’s angry with me because I like enjoying 
myself and loving girls and drinking at pubs and 
doing things as He don’t hold with; so He’s done 
this to pay me out. But I'll show Him as I ain’t 
beat as easy as that. If anyone hereabouts thinks 
that [’'m saved, he'll soon know different. Tl go 


Robert Fuller’s Text 49 


to the gipsies and I'll have that girl Hannah Iden. 
I don’t care what I do!’ 

To fraternize with the gipsies was, in the judge- 
ment of those Sussex villagers, to sound the lowest 
depths of social degradation. A man who mixed 
with gipsies was a pariah, a leper, an outcast. Clem 
tried to reason his big brother into a better mood, 
but it was useless. A few nights later, when he 
took Polly down to the merry-go-round that was 
visiting the village, they saw Robert there with 
Hannah the gipsy-girl clinging to his arm. That 
night, after Clem had seen Polly home, he had to 
help Robert to bed. For Robert came home drunk. 

That is the story of Robert Fuller’s first conver- 
sion—his apple-blossom conversion. It looked 
beautiful and full of promise for a little while; but 
it was a light and airy conversion, a thing of sud- 
den impulse; and, like the petals on the fruit-tree, 
it was swept away by the first rough wind that blew. 


III 


Robert Fuller’s second conversion—his green 
apple conversion—began on Clem’s wedding-day. 
When the happy young bridegroom went to his 
room to dress for the ceremony, he found his elder 
brother already dressed but sitting beside his bed 
shuddering with terror. He held an open Bible in 
his hand. 

“Whatever’s happened?’ asked Clem. 

‘Something terrible!’ replied the agonized Robert. 


50 A Faggot of Torches 


And he told the sympathetic Clem his story. He had 
dreamed that he had seen a great Bible with flames 
rushing out from its covers to destroy him. He 
blanched at every remembrance of it. The dream 
had led him to consult his Bible. He opened it sev- 
eral times at random, and, each time, some dreadful 
text sprang out at him. ‘lit 1s a fearful thing to fall 
into the hands of the living God’; ‘They shall call 
upon Me but I will not answer’; and so on. Clem 
tried to pacify him by opening the Bible at random 
himself. The texts that came to light were, in his 
case, quite meaningless: ‘Three bowls like unto al- 
monds, and soon. The experiment only confirmed 
Robert’s apprehensions. The awful passages that 
had alarmed him were clearly addressed directly to 
himself. They would not come when Clem han- 
dled the Bible. 

From that hour—the hour of Clem’s felicity— 
Robert felt himself to be a lost soul. The flames 
that he had seen darting out of the covers of the 
Bible—the flames of judgement—the flames of hell 
—haunted his fancy sleeping and waking. Since 
he was lost—irretrievably and eternally lost—he 
abandoned himself to his sinister courses with the 
recklessness of despair. Hannah, the gipsy, became 
his evil genius. He and she were inseparable. With 
all the strength of his great burly manhood, he came 
to love her; and, loving her, had not the eyes to see 
that she was only making sport of him. It pleased 
her to show the villagers the power that a gipsy 


Robert Fuller’s Text SI 


could exercise over one of the finest young farmers 
in the district; and it pleased the gipsies to get him, 
through the agency of Hannah, within their grasp. 
One of the most staggering blows that ever fell 
upon Robert was the sudden discovery that, with- 
out a whisper to him, Hannah had married one of 
her own people. He hated and cursed her for hav- 
ing deceived, betrayed, and humiliated him; and 
yet, in spite of himself, he loved her still. 

The experience only intensified the darkness 
through which he was groping his way, a darkness 
that was fitfully illumined by those dreadful 
flames, the flames that broke from his Bible. Partly 
to alleviate his misery and partly to show Hannah 
how little he cared, he suddenly married Mabel 
Powlard. Mabel was a shallow, showy creature. 
She had persistently courted him; but she never 
understood him, never deserved him, never loved 
him and never won his love. He proposed to her 
in one of his sudden gusts of impulse. As he stood 
upon her doorstep on that fateful day, a Voice 
seemed to say to him: ‘Don’t go in there for com- 
fort, Robert; come unto Me! But he stifled the 
Voice and married Mabel. 

Mabel’s tepidness made him sigh for Hannah’s 
warmth: Mabel’s querulousness sent him back to his 
boon companions. He again took to drink; and one 
night, after a drunken orgy, he was found with a 
broken head upon the road—the road that led to 
Hannah! — 


52 A Faggot of Torches 


IV 


When he recovered consciousness he was lying in 
a neat but strange little bedroom reading again and 
again a text upon the wall: 

I have loved thee with an everlasting love, 
therefore with loving kindness have I drawn thee. 

‘The words were written in black letters on a 
clean sheet of paper. They seemed to be nailed to 
his forehead. They were written in darkness on 
light. They were written in light on darkness. 
They burnt him up: he was a little cinder and he 
smouldered in them. Oh, how it hurt! I am tor- 
mented in this flame! It is the love of God. I am 
a little cinder burning in it. Oh, how it hurts! how 
it hurts!’ 

He was in the house of the old minister who had 
found him on the highroad, a minister of a hard 
and narrow faith. There was a Bible in the room, 
and Robert asked for it. It opened at a picture—a 
picture of hell! He read: “Without are dogs. . .’ 
and so on. It was all hell, hell, hell! He could 
find no comfort anywhere: the old minister could 
afford him none. “He will have mercy, said the old 
man, ‘on whom He will have mercy and whom He 
will He hardeneth, 

‘Oh Kiddie,’ he moaned to Mabel, when, one after- 
noon, she deigned to visit him, ‘T’ll never touch an- 
other drop as long as I live, although that will make 
no difference, for the old minister says I’m for the 


Robert Fuller’s Text 53 


wrath to come. Whatever shall I do? What shall 
I do?’ 

The only ray of comfort was the text on the wall: 
I have loved thee with an everlasting love. ‘I have 
loved thee,’ said poor Robert to himself; ‘then per- 
haps He won’t send me to hell for all I’ve been so | 
bad!’ 

At length, after long and gloomy weeks, in which 
the horror of hell was ceaselessly upon him, Robert 
—to use his own phrase—said Amen to his own 
damnation. ‘Thou art holy in all Thy works,’ he 
cried, ‘and righteous in all Thy ways: if in Thy 
sight it is right that I should go to hell, Thy will be 
done! I'll go to hell to please Thee?’ 

He opened his Bible and prayed for a sign that his © 
submission was accepted. It opened at: J have loved 
Thee with an everlasting love. ‘I seemed to melt 
for joy,’ he told Clem. “That was three times I had 
seen those words. So I reckon I’m safe: I'll never 
go in fear of hell any more. I'll give all my 
life to Him, and I'll never drink nor smoke nor 
grumble at Mabel as long as I live!’ 

That is the story of Robert Fuller’s second con- 
version—his green apple conversion. It was an 
escape from hell. He had grasped at the love of 
God in order to obtain deliverance from everlasting 
perdition. Under the influence of that conversion 
Robert set out to warn all the people of the country- 
side to flee from the wrath to come. He neglected 
his wife and child; he forsook his home for days 


54 A Faggot of Torches 


together; he let the farm go to rack and ruin. He 
tramped from village to village, delivering at fairs, 
at markets and on village greens, his stern and ter- 
rible message. He came on a knot of young girls 
gathered at the well and he told them of the tor- 
ments of that fire in which no tongue can be cooled 
and no thirst quenched. He looked in at the smithy, 
and, as the bellows roared and the flames leaped up, 
he told the smith of the day that shall burn as a 
furnace. And then he thought of Hannah! He 
must warn Hannah! He must save Hannah’s soul! 
He went. The gipsies, seeing their chance, left him 
alone with her. She knew her part and played her 
game most cleverly. Even as he preached to her, 
she used her old enchantments. The old feelings 
mastered him. He sprang upon her and smothered 
her face with kisses. The gipsies, watching, rushed 
into the tent. He fought with them and fell. They 
offered to be silent if he would give them gold. He 
refused them the money for which they hungered; 
and they sent him straight to prison. 

The whole countryside mocked and jeered: Mabel, 
disgusted, returned to her father’s home, leaving 
her child with Clem and Polly, who, to their sorrow, 
had no baby of their own. And thus Robert’s 
second conversion—the hard and sour conversion— 
came to nothing. 

V 

After six months in Maidstone Gaol, Robert re- 

turned to Clem and Polly. But he felt that he was 


Robert Fuller’s Text ne 


in everybody’s way. He was a disgrace to the fam- 
ily: he was a scandal to religion: and he stood in 
the way of a happier marriage for Mabel. He would 
drown himself. Writing a word of farewell on the 
fly-leaf of his Bible, he crept out of the house in the 
dawn of a perfect morning. He stole across the 
soft meadows to the pond down among the alders. 
The whole countryside was unspeakably beautiful— 
the fields, the hedgerows, the farms, the cherry-tree 
in full blossom, the sunrise and the song of birds. 
Then, out of the beauty of the world, there came a 
voice: ‘I am your God: don’t you know Me?’ He 
was overpowered by a sense of the love of God. He 
had only thought of the love of God as an escape 
from hell; but here was God loving for the sake of 
loving! Loved with an everlasting love! Loved in 
spite of everything and loved all the time! He hur- 
ried home and told Clem. 

‘And does this mean that you’ve been converted 
again?’ asked Clem dubiously. 

‘It does,’ answered Robert, ‘and I must go and 
tell men that He’s a God of love and of everything 
lovely. I preached a hard gospel before. I said 
that Christ died only for the elect, and that every- 
one else would burn for ever in hell. I took away 
God’s character and I must make it right again.’ 

In spite of all Clem’s arguments, and all Polly’s 
entreaties, he set out. But the mob would not hear 
him. It laid violent hands upon him and did him to 
death at the horsepond. But he was quite happy 


56 A Faggot of Torches 


about it. It was best, as he himself had felt, that he 
should die. And death had come to him very kindly. 
For he had died in trying to show men that God so 
loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, 
that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, 
but have everlasting life. He died rejoicing in the 
certainty that he had himself been loved with an 
everlasting love; for in that fact lay the sublime se- 
cret of Robert Fuller’s real conversion. 


V 
AUGUSTINE’S TEXT 


I 


Amunst the vivid and glowing tints of a North 
African sunrise, a woman, with frightened eyes 
and eager feet, is hurrying towards the quay. She 
is tall and spare; a woman of fifty; but looking older 
than her years. Poor Monica! her life has been a 
hard one. From her husband—ill-tempered and 
dissolute—she has received no sympathy at all. All 
her hope has been built upon her boy, and for years 
he has been a source of ceaseless anxiety to her. 
She has denied herself every day the luxuries that 
women love in order that he may have the best of 
education, the best of pleasures and the best of 
everything, But her sacrifices seem to have been in 
vain. He has lived his own life—a wild and way- 
ward one—and now, if her worst apprehensions are 
confirmed, he has crowned his ingratitude by leav- 
ing her. 

As soon as she comes within sight of the wharves 
she sees, as she expected, that the ship has sailed. 
For days it has been lying there, waiting for a fair 
wind. Her fears were awakened by Augustine’s 
interest in the vessel. He admitted that he was 
longing to go to Rome, and was thinking of taking 
passage in her. But when, with tears and entreaties, 


Syd 


58 A Faggot of Torches 


she had endeavoured to dissuade him, he had laughed 
at her misgivings, and had said that he never 
seriously thought of going. A friend, he explained, 
was leaving by the ship, and he was merely inter- 
ested in the vessel on his companion’s account. On 
waking this morning after a restless night, Monica 
noticed that the wind had changed. With a wom- 
an’s instinctive dread, she rushed to Augustine’s 
room. He was not there! And now, as she turns 
the corner of the street and comes within sight of 
the quay, she sees that the ship is no longer in the 
port. In the hope that he may merely have visited 
the pier to speed his friend’s departure, she hurries 
to the water-side. And there she learns to her dis- 
tress that Augustine was a passenger! She covers 
her face to hide her misery, and turning once more 
towards home, begins sadly to re-ascend the*hill. 
hit 

Faith is not easy to some people. Monica had 
earnestly tried to be a Christian; all her neighbours 
knew of her piety and devotion; yet the stars in their 
courses seemed to be fighting against her. Her very 
prayers appeared a mockery. What is it that Ten- 
nyson says? 

O mother, praying God will save 
Thy sailor—while thy head is bowed 


His heavy-shotted hammock-shroud 
Drops in his vast and wandering grave! 


So was it with Monica. Whilst she was praying 


Augustine’s Text 50 


that her boy—the light of her eyes—might be kept 
pure and sweet and chaste, he was going from excess 
to excess, and every day her gentle spirit was tor- 
tured by some fresh story of his riotous behaviour. 
Last night she fell asleep praying that Augustine 
might be prevented from sailing; this morning she 
wakes to find that the wind has changed, the ship » 
has vanished, and Augustine has gone! 

And yet how blind we are! How little we know! 
It has never occurred to Monica, during her years 
of disappointment and spiritual anguish, that there 
may be a sense in which her son’s uncurbed and 
wayward life may be a response to her prayers. It 
does not occur to her this morning that perhaps Au- 
gustine’s departure for Rome may be the best possi- 
ble answer to the passionate petitions that she offered 
overnight. Yet let us see! 

In his own record of those wasted years, Augus- 
tine tells us that he was hurried from one form of 
indulgence to another by the sheer hunger of his 
heart. He likens his soul to a land that has been 
parched by drought and desolated by famine. He 
was longing, as Mr. R. E. Prothero says, for satis- 
faction; his soul ached for peace; but how to find it 
he knew not. ‘Ever craving for something ideal and 
enduring, haunted by the solitude of his own mind, 
he obeyed the wild impulses of youth, pursued de- 
lights that appealed to his artistic or sensuous na- 
ture, sought distractions in objects pleasing to the 
eye, in games, theatres or music, or in the indulgence 


60 A Faggot of Torches 


of animal passion. Yet, tortured by reproaches of 
conscience, he reaped no harvest of repose; he only 
gleaned self-loathing.’ How little his mother sus- 
pected the insatiable heart-hunger that underlay her 
son’s wanton ways! How little she guessed that, 
even then, in his blind and clumsy way, he was 
groping after God! 

In the course of that feverish pursuit of satisfac- 
tion, Augustine made four famous ventures: (1) 
He tried to find delight in the voluptuous, the sensu- 
ous, the carnal; it was like eating Dead Sea apples; 
the momentary excitement left in his soul a trail of 
loathing and disgust. (2) He tried to find content- 
ment in the purely esthetic. He developed his taste 
for art, for music, for rhetoric, for science; he wor- 
shipped beauty in every phase and form; but it was 
like offering a dainty confectionery to a starving 
man. He was ravenous for something infinitely 
more satisfying. The shallows were babbling to the 
deep: the shallows mocked the deep: for the deep 
is ever listening for the deep’s own call. (3) He 
tried philosophy. The Hortensius of Cicero fell 
into his hands and turned his thoughts in a new 
direction. ‘This book,’ he says, “changed my dis- 
position and gave me other purposes and desires. 
Every vain hope at once became contemptible to 
me, and I longed with an incredible ardour for the 
immortality of wisdom.’ (4) He became religious. 
He read the Scriptures, though to little profit. “They 
seemed to me unworthy to be compared to the state- 


Augustine’s Text 61 


liness of Tully; for my swelling pride shrunk from 
their humility, nor could my sharp wit pierce the in- 
terior thereof.’ He joined the Manicheans—an Ori- 
ental sect which sought to restore the fading glories 
of Zoroastrianism by investing it with some of the 
gentler elements in the Christian faith, “For nine 
years Augustine wandered in the mazes of these 
abstract speculations, his intellect subdued by their 
subtleties, and his imagination charmed by their 
symbolic interpretations of nature.’ But, as Mr. 
Prothero hastens to add, he found no abiding happi- 
ness in this ‘splendid fable’; and, little by little, his 
faith in its authority was undermined. It was when 
the fourth of these experiments—his religion—failed 
him, that he resolved to cross the seas. He was 
soured. His mind was disillusioned and embittered. 
His idols had all fallen and the pedestals were empty. 
He was sceptical of everything. Yet, all the while, 
deep down in the dark abyss of his vacant soul, a 
voice was crying for the light. What voice was it 
that cried? And what was the light that it cried 
for? Augustine is forced to recognize that, after 
having greedily devoured all the husks that have 
come his way, his heart is still famished. He is 
learning sordidly the truth he is yet to teach sub- 
limely: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our 
souls are restless till they find their rest in Thee!’ 
And so, little as she suspects it, Monica’s faith is 
vanquishing her lawless son. ‘With my mother’s 
milk,’ he says, ‘I sucked in the name of Jesus Christ.’ 


62 A Faggot of Torches 


Little as she suspects it, Monica’s prayers are hard 
at work in Augustine’s soul; he is painfully learn- 
ing that ‘none, none but Christ can satisfy.’ And, 
little as she suspects it, those overnight prayers of 
hers were at work on the fateful morning on which 
Augustine sailed for Rome. ‘That night,’ he says, 
in his Confessions, ‘that night I stole away and she 
was left behind in weeping and prayer. And what, 
O Lord, was she with so many tears asking of Thee, 
but that Thou wouldst not suffer me to sail? But 
Thou, in the depth of Thy counsels, knowing the 
main point of her desire, regardedst not what she 
then asked, that Thou mightest accomplish the 
greater thing for which she was ever imploring 
- Lhee.’ 

It seemed as if, during all those years at Carthage, 
Monica’s prayers for her son were unheard and un- 
answered; yet, all the time, he carried within his 
breast a hungry heart. 

It seemed as if the prayers with which she sobbed 
herself to sleep that night were unheeded; and yet, 
as her son said afterwards, the smaller thing for 
which she then asked was denied her in order that 
the larger thing for which she was continually ask- 
ing might be granted. In those two optical illusions 
we have a complete Philosophy of Unanswered 
Prayers. 

III 

But here is Augustine at Rome. He is a tall young 

fellow of thirty, of swarthy skin, dark earnest eyes, 


Augustine’s Text 63 


jet-black hair, and lean emaciated features. The 
historic splendors of the Eternal City fascinate him; 
but he does not stay long. A Professor of Rhetoric 
is needed at Milan, and Augustine seeks and obtains 
the appointment. “Thus to Milan I came,’ he says, 
‘to Ambrose the Bishop, known to the whole world 
as among the best of men.’ It often happens that the 
biggest thing in even the biggest city is the com- 
manding personality of some one man. As Augus- 
tine looked back on his coming to Milan the fine 
figure of Ambrose seemed to dominate the entire 
horizon. Ambrose was just the man for Augustine. 
His very appointment was a romance. Ten years 
before Augustine entered the city, the bishopric was 
vacant. Two candidates stoutly and fiercely con- 
tended for the exalted position. After lengthy dis- 
putation, the Governor of the Province, a brilliant 
young lawyer, was invited to arbitrate between them 
-and decide the weighty question. This young law- 
yer was Ambrose. He entered the church and com- 
menced quietly to reason with the excited people. 
The indescribable charm of his noble personality 
captivated everybody. Suddenly, whilst he was yet 
speaking, the shrill voice of a little child rang 
through the sacred building. ‘Let Ambrose himself 
be our Bishop!’ the little one cried. The incident 
was so extraordinary that it seemed to the assembled 
people that a voice had spoken from the skies, Both 
factors echoed the child’s cry. The rival aspirants 
were forgotten, and Ambrose, in response to the 


64 A Faggot of Torches 


universal acclaim, left the Governor’s chair to be- 
come Bishop of Milan. This is the man who is 
Waiting to minister the bread of life to the hungry 
soul of the new professor. 

To Ambrose, Augustine opens all his heart. Am- 
brose speaks soothingly, sympathetically, and en- 
couragingly to him, and urges him, above all else, 
to study Paul’s epistles. Augustine mentions the 
matter to his bosom friend, Alypius. Augustine 
and Alypius were boys together at Tagaste, in North 
Africa. Alypius has followed his friend, first to 
Carthage and then to Milan. ‘We agreed,’ said 
Augustine, ‘to spend our lives in a most ardent 
search after truth and wisdom. Like me he sighed, 
like me he walked, an earnest searcher after true 
life and a most acute examiner of the most difficult 
questions. He loved me because I seemed to him 
kind and learned; and I loved him for his gentle- 
ness and modesty and virtue.’ The two friends ar- 
range to read the sacred scroll together. Monica, 
who is now a widow, and who has also followed her 
son to Milan, is overjoyed at seeing him devoting 
himself to these new studies. Augustine and Alyp- 
ius decide to begin with the Epistle to the Romans. 
One beautiful afternoon the pair are sitting to- 
gether in a delicious garden on the outskirts of 
Milan. Their textbook—the epistle—rests on the 
seat between them. Something that is read—or 
said—brings powerfully to Augustine’s mind the 
bitter memory of his squandered years. A hurri- 


— = 


Augustine’s Text 65 


cane of unwonted emotion sweeps over him. His 
heart is filled with remorse and his eyes become 
moist with tears. In order that Alypius may not 
witness his weakness, he rises from the seat and 
wanders off to a distant corner of the grounds. 
Here, under the shelter of a leafy fig-tree, he throws 
off the restraint which his friend’s presence had im- 
posed upon him, and lets his tears flow freely. ‘So,’ 
he says, ‘while I was weeping in the most bitter 
contrition of my heart, lo! I heard from a neigh- 
bouring house a voice of a boy or girl—I know not 
which—chanting repeatedly the words: Take up 
and read! Take up and read! Instantly my coun- 
tenance altered; I began to ask myself most intently 
whether children were wont, in any kind of game, 
to sing such words; nor could I ever remember to 
have heard the like. So, checking the torrent of 
my tears, I arose, interpreting the voice as a com- 
mand of God to go back to Alypius, take up the 
epistle, and read the first words I should find. 
Eagerly then I returned to Alypius, seized the vol- 
ume, and in silence read the section on which my 
eyes first fell. The words were these: Not m riot- 
ing and drunkenness, not in chambering and wan- 
tonness, not in strife and envying; but put ye on the 
Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the 
flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof. No further would I 
read, nor was there any need; for at once, with the 
end of this sentence, as though the light of eternity 
had been poured into my heart, all the darkness of 


66 A Faggot of Torches 


doubt vanished. away. Then, putting my finger in 
the place, I closed the volume, and with a calm coun- 
tenance told Alypius what had taken place.’ There- 
upon an incident occurs that ranks among the golden 
romances of the faith. 

For, during Augustine’s absence under the fig- 
tree, Alypius has had a radiant experience of his 
own. He has been reading the epistle alone; has, 
indeed, been studying the very words that his com- 
panion had just read; perhaps that is why they were 
the first to catch Augustine’s eye. But Alypius, 
reading a little further, has been arrested by the 
words that immediately follow: Him that ts weak im 
the faith, receive ye; and has hailed the expression 
as a divine intimation that there is a place even for 
him in the Kingdom of Christ. 

‘Then, Augustine tells us, ‘we went in to my 
mother: we related in turn how it all took place: 
she leapt for joy, and, in her triumph, blessed Him 
who is able to do exceeding abundantly above all 
that we ask or think, for she perceived that God had 
given her more than she was wont to beg by her 
pitiful and most sorrowful groanings.’ 

‘Go thy way,’ a bishop had said to her in the old 
days, when she had consulted him in anguish about 
her wayward son, ‘go thy way and God help thee: 
for it 1s not possible that the child of these tears 
should perish!’ 

As Monica listens, first to the story of Augustine, 
and then to the sequel of Alypius, she, recalling 


Augustine’s Text 67 


those dark and: distant days, smiles at her own 
faithfulness. She really fancied, during those un- 
happy years at Carthage, that heaven was barred 
and bolted against her; she really thought, that 
early morning as she sadly climbed the hill on her 
return from the quay, that God had completely for- 
gotten her. And remembering her unbelief, tears 
of penitence as well as of gratitude glisten on her 
withered cheek. 


IV 


Augustine’s days are all before him. He will yet 
move the world. The engaging personality that 
proved so attractive to the youth of Carthage and 
Milan is yet to cast its spell over myriads of young 
lives who, guided by him, will be saved from the 
snares and pit-falls into which he stumbled. The 
stately rhetoric that stirred the multitudes when he 
discoursed on history and philosophy is to be conse- 
crated to evangelistic ends; the charm of his voice 
and the persuasiveness of his eloquence are yet to 
awaken countless consciences and to lead thousands 
of trembling penitents to the Saviour of the World 
—his mother’s Saviour and his own. By his writings 
he is to appeal with heart-searching potency and 
effectiveness to a hundred nations and to a hundred 
generations. ‘No human mind since that of Paul,’ 
says one of our most competent critics, ‘has so 
widely, deeply and persuasively influenced the 
Church of Christ.’ Yes, Augustine’s days are all 


68 A Faggot of Torches 


before him: but Monica’s frail frame is spent. She 
does not long survive the memorable day on which 
Augustine and Alypius are baptized and welcomed 
by Ambrose into the Church. 

‘My son,’ she says softly, as they sit together at 
a window in Ostia, a short time afterwards, watch- 
ing the long, long shadows which the autumn sun- 
set 1s casting across the green, green lawn, ‘my son, 
I know not to what end I linger here. I had but one 
desire, the desire to see thee a Christian before I 
died. There is no reason why I should tarry longer.’ 

They remain at the window, hand in hand, until 
the sunshine and the shadows have alike departed. 
In the twilight Augustine hears her crooning softly 
to herself the beautiful Latin paraphrase: Lord, now 
lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, for mine 
eyes have seen Thy salvation. ‘The air becomes 
chilly, and they leave the window. A week later, 
Augustine turns sadly but reverently and gratefully 
from his mother’s quiet resting-place, and com- 
mences the lifework that has made him one of the 
most sublime and uplifting forces in the history of 
the world. 


VI 
JOSEPHINE BUTLER’S TEXT 


I 


ONCE upon a time, when the world was young, 
angels often appeared among men. They do still; 
but they take a different form. If the old days— 
the patriarchal days—could have produced a Santa 
Teresa or an Elizabeth Fry or a Frances Willard or 
a Catherine Booth or a Josephine Butler, there 
would have been no need for the coming of the 
angels. It was because the sacred tree that had been 
divinely planted in the midst of the nations was as 
yet incapable of producing such fruit, that special 
provision had to be made. In those days the angels 
came and went, but they came and went leaving little 
to show for their coming. Josephine Butler came, 
and earth can never be quite the same again. 
Misery fled before her, as darkness is scattered at 
dawn. Thousands of lives, soured and wretched, 
were sweetened and brightened; social life became 
pervaded by a new and healthier atmosphere; the 
laws of nations were made more just and more 
humane. The Right Hon. James Stuart, M.A,, 
LL.D., declares that there is no man living, and cer- 
69 


70 A Faggot of Torches 


tainly no woman, whose lot is not the happier for 
Josephine Butler’s influence. “The world,’ he says, 
‘is different because she lived: she belongs to all 
nations and to all people: the seed that she has sown 
can never die.’ | 

It is a singularly lovable and engaging figure 
that is conveyed by the biographies to the sensitive 
plate of one’s fancy. We see her as a cultured and 
graceful girl, fond of music, fond of painting, par- 
ticularly fond of dogs and passionately fond of 
fun. She loves to be prettily dressed; loves the 
open air; and loves to find herself mounted on a 
horse of spirit and mettle. She is a born romp. 
She has an exceptional gift of making herself per- 
fectly and delightfully at home with people of all 
kinds and classes; the most exalted and the most 
degraded feel completely at their ease in her com- 
pany. “She is very beautiful,’ writes one who knew 
her well, ‘and of sweet and gracious presence; and 
the impression made by seeing her face and hearing 
her voice for the first time can never be forgotten by 
those who met her.’ 

Josephine owed much to her parents. There 
were two sets of stories that she loved to hear her 
father tell. As the friend and colleague of Clark- 
son, the abolitionist, he had taken a prominent part 
in the heroic struggle that issued in the emancipa- 
tion of the slaves. She often sat at his feet whilst 
he related some of the most thrilling episodes in 
that notable crusade; and, afterwards, she often 


Josephine Butler’s Text 71 


spoke of her own attempt to uplift the world’s 
womanhood as the natural continuation of her 
father’s fight for freedom. Then again, the home 
of her girlhood was close to Flodden Field. Her 
father had made himself master of the story of that 
fateful day in 1513— 


When shivered was fair Scotland’s spear, 
And broken was her shield. 


‘Many a time,’ she says, ‘did my father recite to his 
children every incident of the battle, as he rode or 
walked with them over Flodden, sometimes resting 
at the King’s Chair or sitting by Sybil’s Well.’ Her 
mother, too, had stories to tell, though of a different 
kind. For, Josephine says, ‘one of my mother’s 
earliest memories was of being lifted upon the knee 
of the venerable John Wesley, a man with white 
silvery hair and a benevolent countenance, who 
placed his two hands upon the head of the golden- 
haired little girl and pronounced over her a tender 
and solemn benediction.” The child of such par- 
ents, reared in an atmosphere so pure and so ro- 
mantic, it was natural that Josephine Butler should 
early feel herself to be a citizen of the eternities. 
Her fancy took far flights: her mind insisted on 
exploring the riddles of the universe: she caught 
herself probing in solitude questions of life and 
death and immortality. ‘It was my lot,’ she says, 
‘from my earliest years to be haunted by the prob- 
lems which more or less present themselves to every 


72 A Faggot of Torches 


thoughtful mind.’ Year after year this haunting 
became more tyrannous. Her hungry heart sought 
help, and sought it frantically, but no help was to 
be found. ‘My early home was far from cities,’ 
she adds. ‘I was with parents who taught by their 
lives what true men and women should be. Two 
miles away stood the parish church to which we 
trudged dutifully every Sunday. There an 
honest man in the pulpit taught us loyally all that 
he himself knew about God. But his words did 
not even touch the fringe of my soul’s deep dis- 
content.’ | 

The tyrannous haunting of the eager mind! 

The hunger of a fresh young heart! 

The soul's deep discontent! 

But there is wisdom in the craving for wisdom; 
there is grace in the desire for grace. In those days 
of dumb longing and blind groping, Josephine But- 
ler was richer than she knew. 


II 


Who would have guessed that, beneath her 
laughing face and her vivacious behaviour, this 
bright young Scottish schoolgirl carried such an 
aching heart? More often than we fancy there lies, 
beneath the gaiety that we see upon the surface, a 
deeper stratum of wistfulness and gravity. Jose- 
phine’s secret anguish lasted for twelve long 
months. The words in which she has recorded 
the story of her travail are worthy to rank among 


Josephine Butler’s Text 73 


the classics of the soul. Not Augustine in his Con- 
fessions, nor Bunyan in his Grace Abounding, nor 
Brainerd in his Journal, nor Newton, nor Wool- 
man, nor Fox has displayed a more profound 
spiritual genius. 

‘For one long year of darkness,’ she says, ‘the 
trouble of heart and brain urged me to lay all this 
at the door of the God whose Name I had learned 
was Love. I dreaded Him, I fled from Him, until 
grace was given me to arise and wrestle, as Jacob 
did, with the mysterious Presence, who must either 
slay or pronounce deliverance. And then the great 
questioning went up from earth to heaven, “God! 
Who art Thou? Where art Thou? Why is it thus 
with the creatures of Thy hand?’ I fought the 
battle alone, in deep recesses of the beautiful woods 
and pine forests around our home, or on some 
lonely hillside, among wild thyme and heather, a 
silent temple where the only sounds were the plain- 
tive cry of the curlew or the hum of the summer 
bee or the distant bleating of sheep. For hours and 
days and weeks in these retreats I sought the answer 
to my soul’s trouble and the solutions of its dark 
questionings. Looking back, it seems to me that the 
end must have been defeat and death had not the 
Saviour imparted to the child-wrestler something 
of the virtue of His own midnight agony, when in 
Gethsemane His sweat fell like great drops of blood 
to the ground.’ 

It was, as she says elsewhere, a case of deep call- 


74 A Faggot of Torches 


ing unto deep. She felt, she tells us, like one who 
is leaning over a great gulf, whence none who fall 
into it ever return. And then—‘the pride and re- 
bellion of my heart gave way before deep and heavy 
sorrow; and all the sorrow gathered itself up into 
one great cry. In my distress I cried unto the Lord 
and He heard me.’ And this is the record of her 
deliverance: 

‘Looking my liberator in the face, I took my 
place—oh, with what infinite contentment !—by the 
side of her, the “woman in the city which was a 
sinner,’ of whom He, her Liberator and mine, said, 
“this woman hath not ceased to kiss my feet.” ’ 

The annals of spiritual experience contain noth- 
ing more touching than the spectacle of this pure- 
souled, high-spirited Scottish maiden, finding her 
only solace in kneeling beside the ‘woman in the 
city which was a sinner’ and sharing with her the 
rapture of the divine forgiveness. Nor was it the 
passing fancy of a morbid mood. In the great 
after-years she referred to the experience again and 
again, and set upon it the seal of her mature and 
mellow judgement. It gave direction to all her 
cultured and consecrated energies. She rose from 
her knees that day to be the sister, the protector, the 
champion of the despised creature by whose side she 
seemed to have knelt. And in one of her last ad- 
dresses I find her giving thanks that “God has done 
me the great honour of allowing me, for more than 
thirty years, to be the representative of the outcast 


Josephine Butler’s Text 75 


—the woman in the city which was a sinner. It is 
her voice which I have tried to utter.’ 


Tit 


The Woman Which was a Sinner! ‘Whenever I 
think of this story,’ says Gregory the Great, ‘I feel 
more inclined to weep over it than to preach on it.’ 

And, behold a woman in the city, which was a 
sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the 
Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster box of oint- 
ment, and stood at His feet behind Him weeping, 
and began to wash His feet with tears, and did wipe 
them with the hairs of her head and kissed His feet, 
and anointed them with the ointment. 

Thus the story opens. The best comment is 
Edersheim’s. ‘She had been listening to Him as 
He addressed the multitude,’ says that great Jewish 
expositor. “She heard Him say: Come unto Me all 
ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give 
you rest. As she looked into His face and listened 
to those words she believed that He was able to-do 
as He had said. Like heaven’s own music, as 
angels’ songs that guide the wanderer home, the 
words rang in her ears. She followed Him, even 
into the Pharisee’s house, There are times when 
we forget all else in one absorbing thought; when 
men’s opinions—nay our own feelings of shame— 
are effaced by that one Presence; when the Come 
unto Me of Jesus is the all-in-all to us. The foun- 
tains of the great deep within are broken up.’ So 


76 A Faggot of Torches 


was it with her that day, and tens of thousands in 
their anguish have since blessed her for the holy au- 
dacity that hurried her to her Lord. 

‘Her story,’ says Sir J. R. Seeley in Ecce Homo, 
‘her story has gone to the heart of Christendom. It 
has given origin and even a name to institutions 
which are found wherever the Christian Church is 
found, and the object of which is to redeem women 
who have fallen from virtue. It has given to 
Christian art the figure of the Magdalene which 
when contrasted with the Venus of Greek sculpture 
represents in a very palpable manner the change 
which Christ has wrought in the moral feelings of 
mankind with respect to women.’ 

And He turned to the woman and said unto 
Simon, Seest thou this woman? I entered ito 
thine house; thou gavest me no water for my feet; 
but she hath washed my feet with tears and wiped 
them with the hairs of her head. Wherefore I say 
unto thee Her sins which are many, are forgiven, 
for she loved much. And He said unto her, Thy 
sins are forgiven. ... Thy faith hath saved thee; 
go in peace. 

‘One evening,’ says Boswell, ‘Dr. Johnson, in my 
company, repeated to Mr. Langton, with great 
energy, in the Greek, our Saviour’s gracious expres- 
sion concerning “the woman in the city which was 
a sinner’—Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace. 
“The manner of this dismission,”’” added the doctor, 
“is exceedingly affecting.” ’ 


rs 


Josephine Butler’s Text "7 


IV 


The qualities of Mary and of Martha were never 
more perfectly combined in one personality than in 
the case of Josephine Butler. There was a sense 
in which she spent the whole of her life kneeling at 
her Saviour’s feet, washing them with her tears and 
wiping them with the hairs of her head. She was 
one of our greatest mystics. 

‘Long ago,’ she says, ‘I asked a gift of God, com- 
panionship with Christ. Shall I murmur because 
He, having granted my request, grants it in His 
own way? I thought of Mary, sitting at His feet. 
But He grants me the companionship of the male- 
factor, nailed to a neighbouring cross. 1 cannot 
grasp His hand, nor kiss His feet, nor lean on His 
breast as did the beloved disciple, for I am bound 
hand and foot, stretched on my cross till every nerve 
and muscle strains and aches. I can only turn my 
head to that side where the Lord hangs in pain also, 
so near that I can hear His breathing, His sighs, 
the beating of His heart. The cross which brings 
me so near to Him is the hindrance to a still nearer 
approach.’ 

She delighted in the medizeval saints and dwelt 
lingeringly on the classic examples of eminent de- 
votion. She herself wrote a Life of Jean Frederic 
Oberlin and a Life of Catherine of Siena. In her 
Catherine Mr. Gladstone was intensely interested. 
‘It is evident,’ he wrote, ‘that Mrs. Butler is on the 


“8 A Faggot of Torches 


level of her subject, and it is a very high level.’ 

Josephine Butler devoted the best energies of her 
life to her brave struggle to save the flotsam and 
jetsam of the world’s womanhood. That was her 
mission. Yet, strangely enough, she reached, and 
reached profoundly, some of the most cultured 
minds of her time. Two of the finest literary efforts 
of that day are dedicated to Josephine Butler. The 
one is Dora Greenwell’s Patience of Hope; the other 
is F. W. H. Myers’ St. Paul. In the inscription to 
her book, Dora Greenwell, addressing Josephine 
Butler in Latin, says: ‘From thee begun, with thee 
my word shall close; without thee nothing high my 
mind essays.’ Frederic Myers’ tribute is still more 
striking. He dedicates St. Paul to J. E.B. ‘to 
whom I owe my very soul.’ In another of his 
works Mr. Myers tells us that ‘conversion came to 
me in a potent form—through the agency of Jose- 
phine Butler, whose name will never be forgotten 
in the annals of Christian philanthropy. She in- 
troduced me to Christianity, so to say, by an inner 
door; not to its encumbering forms and dogmas, 
but to its heart of fire.’ 


V 
But it is not with stories like these that the pages 
of her biography are crowded. She knelt on the 
day of her conversion beside the woman of the city 
which was a sinner. She felt drawn to her. The 
woman represented a class for whom, in those days, 


Josephine Butler’s Text 79 


nobody cared. Shortly afterwards, two incidents” — 


coloured Mrs. Butler’s life. A travelling circus 
came to the neighbourhood. Mrs. Butler made the 
acquaintance of one of the girls who performed in 
it. She found that she loathed the life in which she 
was plunged, ‘the most innocent part of which was 
her acrobatic performances.’ One night this terri- 
fied creature escaped. She was pursued by the cir- 
cus people and caught not far from Mrs. Butler’s 
beautiful home. It was a warm Sunday evening. 
Mrs. Butler happened to be sitting at an open win- 
dow. She heard the girl’s piercing scream. It 
sounded in her ears as a cry of womanhood in dis- 
tress, and she was haunted by it continually. This 
was the first incident; the second touched her still 
more closely. Her own little Eva, her only daugh- 
ter, overbalanced on the banister rail, fell with a 
crash in the hall, and, a few hours later, died with- 
out regaining consciousness. For months it seemed 
as if the shock would shatter the mother’s reason 
or destroy her health. But, when she recovered, 
she resolved that all the prodigal daughters of the 
world should be her daughters; and she devoted the 
rest of her days to one of the most beautiful min- 
istries that the world has ever seen. In the course 
of those thirty years, thousands of woebegone 
creatures heard through her lips the Saviour’s Come 
unto Me, and, like the woman in Simon’s house, 
they knelt at His feet, washed those feet with their 
tears and wiped them with the hairs of their heads. 


80 A Faggot of Torches 


VI 


“Regard me,’ she said, in one of her very last mes- 
sages, ‘regard me as one whom sorrow and love 
have taught that none of the great human family 
are forgotten by Him who redeemed them, by the 
Eternal Father whose very name is LOVE.’ The 
capitals are hers. She lived to be eighty. One 
night—the last night but one of the old year—she 
went to her rest as usual. She closed her eyes in 
sleep and never opened them again. Or rather, 
when she opened them, she saw Him at whose 
pierced feet she had wept and from whose sacred 
lips she had received the glad assurance of absolu- 
tion. And she found herself surrounded by a great 
company of women who, forgiven much and loving 
much, owed to her their happy entrance into the 
Kingdom of purity and light. 


VII 
JOHN WOOLMAN’S TEXT 


I 


JoHN Wootman did a work that moved the world; 
but he did it when nobody was looking. He did it 
without snapping a twig or rustling a leaf; and he 
did it in such a way that nobody suspected him of 
having done it. One of our most eminent authori- 
ties—Mr. George Macaulay Trevelyan—shudders 
as he asks himself what would have become of the 
world if John Woolman had never come into it. 
Another—Mr, Alexander Smellie, M.A.—declares 
that no man, of any age or country, better deserves 
to be everlastingly remembered; whilst a third ‘sums 
up everything by proclaiming John Woolman the 
most Christlike man who ever lived. Beyond that 
point, eulogy finds it impossible to go. 
Notwithstanding his excessive modesty, the best 
record of John Woolman’s lifework is his own. The 
only trouble is that, as Crabb Robinson so justly 
complains, Woolman conceals important events in 
which he himself played a most gallant part. Yet, 
for all that, it is difficult to imagine a more delight- 
ful book than the Journal as it stands. Crabb 
Robinson would agree in that. ‘I have been reading 
John Woolman’s Journal; he says, ‘it is a perfect 
SI 


82 A Faggot of Torches 


gem. His was a most beautiful soul.’ Channing 
declares that it is incomparably the sweetest and 
purest autobiography in the language. ‘Learn it by 
heart!’ says Charles Lamb, in one of his loveliest 
essays. “There are three autobiographies that I 
think of together,’ says Mr. Trevelyan. ‘They are 
The Confessions of St. Augustine, The Confessions 
of Jean Jacques Rousseau and John Woolman’s 
Journal, Each of these men had soul-life abun- 
dantly and the power of recording his experiences; 
and each gave the impulse to a great current in the 
world’s affairs—Augustine to the Medizeval Church, 
Rousseau to the French Revolution, and John Wool- 
man to the abolition of slavery. But I am proud to 
feel that, of the three, John Woolman, the Anglo- 
Saxon, is by far the most attractive.’ I wonder if 
we can find the hidden secret of so fragrant and 
potent an influence! 
II 

In the picturesque backwoods of New Jersey the 
Quakers had it all their own way a couple of cen- 
turies ago. Surrounded on every hand by a riot of 
noble forestry—the maple and the magnolia; the 
rhododendron and the azalea; the chestnut and the 
basswood; the walnut and, the hickory; the willow 
and the sycamore; the elm and the oak; the fir, the 
poplar and the silver birch—these tranquil souls 
lived at peace with all the world, and even estab- 
lished a perfect understanding with the fierce In- 
dian tribes around them. In his monumental His- 


a 


John Woolman’s Text 83 


tory of the United States, Bancroft declares that the 
formation of that peaceful colony in the gloomy re- 
cesses Of the silent woods is one of the most beauti- 
ful incidents in the history of civilization. For 
there, he says, on the banks of the Delaware, there 
sprang up a race of men who laboured for inward 
stillness, who only desired to live in the spirit of 
truth and goodness, who learned to love God in all 
His manifestations in the visible world, and who 
testified, with gentle insistence, against cruelty to- 
wards the least creature in which His divine spirit 
had kindled the flame of life. 

It was that subdued but fervent plea for tender- 
ness towards all living things that opened the eyes 
of John Woolman to the realization of his soul’s 
deep need. For it was into that Quaker settlement 
on the Delaware that, in the year 1720, John Wool- 
man was born. A child of a Quaker home and a 
child of the American forest, he caught the spirit 
of both. He imbibed Quaker thoughts and Quaker 
ways from his earliest infancy; he wore the drab 
Quaker costume, and always spoke with a ‘thee’ and 
a ‘thou.’ Yet, at the same time, his boyish spirit 
revelled in the leafy solitudes around him. At day- 
break he listened with delight to the liquid carol of 
the mocking bird; during the day he loved to hear 
the woods ring with the plaintive note of the whip- 
poor-will; and at evening he strained his ears to 
catch the shrill cry of the nighthawk. In his soli- 
tary rambles he surprised furry creatures of all 


84 A Faggot of Torches 


sorts and sizes and became fondly familiar with 
their haunts and ways. He learned the habits of 
the rattlesnake and the beaver, the woodchuck and 
the porcupine; he knew where to look for the blue- 
bird and the prairie hen, the parrot and the hum- 
ming-bird. His Quaker instincts taught him the 
preciousness of quietness; and in the silent woods 
the soltitudes took him into their confidence and 
poured into his heart their secrets. 

But one day a strange thing happened, a thing 
that startled and terrified him. He discovered 
something within himself that seemed utterly for- 
eign to himself. And, in view of that Quaker tes- 
timony against cruelty of every kind, it filled him 
with horror, apprehension, and dismay. He was 
only a little child at the time; yet the emotions 
awakened by the episode made his blood run cold 
thirty years afterward when, for the first time, he 
committed the story to paper. We must let him 
tell it for himself. 

‘On going to a neighbour’s house,’ he says, “I saw 
a robin sitting on her nest, and as I came near she 
went off. But, having young ones, she flew about, 
and, with many cries, expressed her concern for 
them. I stood and threw stones at her. One of 
them struck her and she fell down dead. At first I 
was pleased with the exploit, but, after a -few min- 
utes, I was seized with horror at having, in a spor- 
tive way, killed an innocent creature whilst she was 
caring for her young. I beheld her lying dead, and 





John Woolman’s Text 85 


reflected that those younger ones, of which she had 
taken such care, must perish for want of their 
mother. After some painful considerations on the 
subject, I climbed up the tree, took all the fledge- 
lings and killed them, supposing it better that they 
should die thus than that they should pine away and 
die miserably. There flashed into my mind the 
Scripture which says that the tender mercies of the 
wicked are cruel; and for some hours I could think 
of nothing but the horrible evil that I had com- 
mitted.’ He was in an agony of remorse. When 
the family bowed their heads in the reverent sim- 
plicity of their domestic worship, the desolating 
vision of the dead birds under the empty nest 
rushed back upon him even whilst his eyes were 
closed. The memory of his hard-heartedness tor- 
tured him in the night. He recalled all the gentle 
admonitions that he had heard from the lips of his 
Quaker teachers; and the words, as they returned 
to him, intensified his sense of the enormity of his 
transgression. It was not so much that there were 
some dead robins lying under a fir-tree; it was that 
there was a sinister something in his own heart that 
might at any moment surprise him by its wicked- 
ness and barbarity. He was only a child at the 
time, but the matter was a deep concern to him. ‘I 
was much troubled,’ he says. | 

Following hard on the heels of this agitating ex- 
perience, and perhaps in consequence of it, there 
came a brighter one. The first experience was a 


Y 


86 A Faggot of Torches 


vision of sin; the second was a vision of salvation. 
He was still extremely young. ‘Before I was seven 
years old,’ he says, ‘I began to be acquainted with 
the operation of divine love. Through the care 
of my parents, I was taught to read nearly as soon 
as I was capable of it; and as I went from school 
one day, I remember that, while my companions 
were playing by the way, I went forward out of 
sight, and, sitting down, I read the twenty-second 
chapter of the Book of Revelation: He showed me 
a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, 
proceeding out of the throne of God and of the 
Lamb. In reading it, my mind was drawn to seek 
after that pure habitation which I then believed 
God had prepared for His servants.’ Thirty years 
afterwards he tells us that the spot by the roadside 
where he sat that day, and the sweetness that visited 
his mind when he read the gracious words, were 
still perfectly fresh and vivid in his memory. 


Iil 


A pure river! He showed me a pure river of 
water of life! In one of the last articles that he 
wrote, Sir William Robertson Nicoll instituted a 
striking comparison between John Woolman and 
Santa Teresa. “The Quaker diarist and the Spanish 
nun were alike,’ he says, ‘in their vision of waters— 
the living waters.’ The analogy is very arresting. 
In my own treatment of Santa Teresa’s Text, in A 
Casket of Cameos, I have already said that, ‘with 


. 
F 





John Woolman’s Text, 87 


Santa Teresa, it was water, water everywhere, and 
water all the time. It was a story of the mystic 
waters that first inclined her heart towards the 
Saviour. Her teaching is illustrated throughout by 
the symbolism of the stream. She seems to think 
in the terms of the pool and the cataract, the well 
and the shower; the laughing rivulet and the un- 
fathomable ocean depths.’ Sir William Robertson 
Nicoll points out that, ‘like Teresa, John Woolman 
was influenced all his life by these flowing streams 
of divine grace.’ Does he find his work particularly 
baffling and difficult? The record is sure to add 
that ‘through the goodness of our Heavenly Father, 
the Well of Living Waters was opened to our en- 
couragement and refreshment.’ In his Kim, Mr. 
Rudyard Kipling pictures the old lama tramping 
along the highways and byways of India asking tire- 
lessly one everlasting question. The River? Where 
is the River? The River of Buddha? The River 
that can cleanse from sin? The joy that rippled 
through the soul of John Woolman two centuries 
ago, and the joy that Teresa tasted two centuries 
earlier still, was the joy that they know who have 
found the river—the pure river of the water of life 
—the river that Kipling’s old lama sought so cease- 
lessly but sought in vain. 

The very thought of John Woolman makes those 
who are familiar with him long for another vision 
of those wondrous waters. Whittier sent a copy of 
John Woolman’s Journal to a friend, and accom- 


88 A Faggot of Torches 


panied the gift with a poem of his own. In one 
of the verses he says of the Journal that it 
Serves to strengthen 
Yearnings for a higher good, 


For the fount of living waters 
And diviner food. 


The fact is that the living stream that poured itself 
into the soul of John Woolman as he sat by the side 
of the road that day, has, ever since, been pouring 
itself out again. And that is precisely what the 
Saviour said. Whosoever drinketh of the water 
that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water 
that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water 
springing up into everlasting life. And again, In 
the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood 
and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come 
unto Me and drink. He that believeth on Me, out 
from him shall flow rivers of living water. Ex- 
actly so was it with John Woolman. Indeed, his 
biographers have found it impossible to avoid the 
exact imagery of these passages. “His works,’ says 
Mr. Alexander Smellie, M.A., ‘his works follow 
him to this hour. He was one of the first to open 
fountains of healing and refreshment, of righteous- 
ness and mercy, the waters of which are still flow- 
ing in an undiminished flood.’ 

‘He showed me a pure river of water of life, clear 
as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and 
of the Lamb, says John Woolman, in describing 
his conversion. 


| 
| 





John Woolman’s Text 89 


‘If any man drink of the water that I shall give 
him, it shall be in him, springing up into everlasting 
life,’ says the Saviour. 

‘John Woolman opened fountains of healing and 
refreshment which are still lowing in an undimin- 
ished flood, says his biographer. 

Like one who, from a hill-top, catches sight, here 
and there, of the shining waters, and is able to make 
out the river’s course, let us glance at the life of 
John Woolman in the hope of tracing the flow of 
the fertilizing streams! 


IV 


He is twenty-one! He has obtained a position in 
a store at Mount Holly and occupies his spare time 
in teaching a cluster of little children who gather 
eagerly about him. One day, as he sits at his desk 
in the store, a strange thing happens. ‘My employer, 
having a negro woman, sold her, and desired me to’ 
write a bill.of sale. The man who had bought her 
stood waiting. I felt very uneasy at the thought of 
writing an instrument of slavery for one of my fel- 
low-creatures. I was so afflicted in my mind that I 
told my master, and the Quaker who had bought 
the woman, that I believed slave-keeping to be a 
practice inconsistent with the Christian religion.’ 
The more Woolman pondered the matter the more 
it worried him. He resolved to give up his position 
and to trudge from settlement to settlement urging 
the Quakers to wipe their hands of the traffic in 


90 A Faggot of Torches 


slaves. And, as Mr. Trevelyan says, his Journal 
shows how this humblest and quietest of men used 
to travel round on foot, year after year, among 
those old-fashioned American Quakers, stirring 
their honest but sleepy consciences. A Quaker Soc- 
rates, with his searching, simple questions, -he sur- 
passed his Athenian prototype in love and patience 
and argumentative fairness. And when the Friends 
found that they could not answer John’s questions, 
instead of poisoning him or locking him up as an 
anarchist, they let their slaves go free. ‘Incredible 
as it may seem,’ continues Mr. Trevelyan, ‘they 
asked no one for compensation; but then the Quak- 
ers always were an odd people!’ And thus that 
agitation began which, more than a century later, 
culminated in the emancipation of the slaves. Trace 
that good historic movement to its source, and 
there, at its fountain-head, you will find the solitary 
figure of John Woolman! How would it have gone 
with the world, Mr. Trevelyan asks, if that poor 
clerk had kept to himself those queer questionings 
of his about holding fellow-men as property? But 
he did not stifle his conscience: he never did; and, 
because he was true to the light that shone upon 
him, he, in his turn, illumined the whole world. He 
drank of the mystic waters, and out from him there 
gushed the streams that made the earth more fair. 

He is forty-three! In his pilgrimages through 
Pennsylvania, he has often ‘felt inward drawings’ 
towards the Indians. He has frequently met them 


John Woolman’s Text oI 


in the woods. But why not go to their settlements 
and tell them of the pure river, clear as crystal, 
flowing out of the throne of God and of the Lamb? 
He talks it over, first with his wife, and then with 
some of the other Quakers. They remind him of 
the barbarities that the red men have recently per- 
petrated. Farms have been raided; forts have been 
destroyed; villages have been set on fire; the scalp- 
ing knife never seems at rest. But John Woolman 
knows no fear. He set out for the Indian settle- 
ment at Wehaloosing on the Susquehannah; mas- 
tered the language and won the hearts of the In- 
dians; and for some years John Woolman, with his 
Quaker garb, his tall form and his drooping shoul- 
ders, John Woolman, with his shock of black hair, 
his pale face and his quiet but pleading eyes, was a 
familiar and honoured figure in the wigwams and 
at the campfires of the red men. 

He is fifty-two! It has long been his desire to 
visit England, and now he is at York. On the voy- 
age across the Atlantic the rough sailors became 
very fond of the quaint backwoodsman who in- 
sisted on travelling steerage and sharing their lot. 
And his Journal proves that his heart was overflow- 
ing with affection and compassion for them. After 
a somewhat chilly reception at the hands of the 
Quakers in London—who failed at first to under- 
stand him—he entered York on foot on- September 
27, 1772. Henry Tuke, a young Quaker of eigh- 
teen, went out to meet him. ‘I have frequently 


92 A Faggot of Torches 


heard my father speak of this walk, said 
Henry Tuke’s son, many years afterwards, ‘and of 
the indescribable sweetness of John Woolman’s 
company and the pleasure with which he remem- 
bered it.’ | 

Hie had come to York to die—a victim of small- 
pox. 
‘My life is in Christ,’ he said, ‘my whole depend- 
ence is on the Lord Jesus who, I trust, will forgive 
me my sins: this is all I can hope for.’ 

Seeing a young Quakeress weeping near the bed, 
he begged her to wipe away her tears. 

‘I would rather thou wouldst guard against weep- 
ing for me,’ he said. “Rejoice evermore and in 
everything give thanks. I sorrow not, though I 
have had some painful conflicts; but now they seem 
over and matters well settled; I shall soon look on 
the face of my dear Redeemer, for sweet is His 
voice and His countenance is comely.’ 

And so, to the last, he drank with delight of the 
living waters. Amidst his greatest ordeals he found 
refreshment there. He tells how, one dark night, 
when he was on his way to preach to a tribe of hos- 
tile Indians, a drenching rain set in. He was far 
from tent or habitation; it was impossible to light 
a fire; he lay down in the forest and all night long 
the rain pitilessly lashed his face. ‘But,’ he adds, ‘I 
found my soul filled with comfort as I meditated 
on the love of God.’ Those divine fountains never | 
failed him. And, according to the promise, the re- 





John Woolman’s Text 93 


freshing streams poured out from him; the slaves 
were emancipated; the Indians were evangelized ; 
the whole world was sweetened and enriched; and, 
as Whittier sings, his Journal still sets thousands 
yearning for the living waters. For the water that 
his Saviour gave him was in lum, a well of water, 
springing up into everlasting life. 


Vill 
FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY’S TEXT 


I 


Russia had never seen such a funeral. It was in 
many respects the most extraordinary demonstra- 
tion of public feeling ever witnessed in the Czar’s 
dominions. ‘The sorrow was a national sorrow, 
the loftiest and the lowliest alike lamented; the 
cities were in tears. Forty thousand men followed 
the coffin to the grave. ‘When I heard of Dostoy- 
evsky’s death,’ says Tolstoy, ‘I felt that I had lost 
a kinsman, the closestvand the dearest, and the one 
of whom I had most need.’ The students of Rus- 
sia, to whom he had been a father, sent an open 
letter to his widow. 

‘Dostoyevsky’s ideals,’ they said, “will never be 
forgotten. From generation to generation we shall 
hand them down as a precious inheritance from our 
great and beloved teacher. His memory will never 
be extinguished in the hearts of the youth of Rus- 
sia, and, in years to come, we shall teach our chil- 
dren to love and honour his name. Dostoyevsky 
will always stand out brightly before us in the battle 
of life; for it was he who taught us the possibility 
of preserving the purity of the soul undefiled in 
every position of life and in all conceivable condi-. 
tions and circumstances.’ 


94 


Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Text 9s 


Clearly, then, we have here a man among men; a 
man who stirred the hearts of thousands; a man 
who, through his books, still speaks to multitudes. 
What is the secret of his deep and widespread in- 
fluence? Let us go back a day or two! 


II 


That never-to-be-forgotten funeral took place on 
February 12, 1881. On February 9, Dostoyevsky 
lay dying. ‘When he awoke that morning,’ his 
daughter tells us, ‘my mother realized that his hours 
were numbered.’ 

Brave little mother! so this is the end of her fif- 
teen years of romance! In the novels of Dostoyev- 
sky there is no prettier story than the story of the 
meeting of these two. Dostoyevsky was forty-five 
at the time. Through voluntarily taking over the 
debts of his dead brother, his finances had become 
involved. Moreover, he had fallen into the clutches 
of an unscrupulous publisher, for whom he had 
contracted to write a novel on the understanding 
_ that, if it was not finished by a certain date, all the 
author’s copyrights would fall into the publisher’s 
hands. As the date approached, the impossibility of 
the task became evident, and ruin stared him in the 
face. Somebody advised him to get a stenographer ; 
but no stenographer could be found. There was, 
it is true, a girl of nineteen who knew shorthand; 
but lady stenographers were then unknown; and the 
girl doubted if her. people would consent to her 


96 A Faggot of Torches 


taking the appointment. However, Dostoyevsky’s 
fame removed the parents’ scruples, and she set to 
work. On her way to the novelist’s house, she used 
to tell her daughter afterwards, she tried to imag- 
ine what their first session would be like. “We shall 
work for an hour,’ she thought, ‘and then we shall 
talk of literature.’ Dostoyevsky had had an epilep- 
tic attack the night before; he was absent-minded, 
nervous, and peremptory. He seemed quite uncon- 
scious of the charms of his young stenographer, and 
treated her as a kind of Remington typewriter. He 
dictated the first chapter of his novel in a harsh 
voice, complained that she did not write fast enough, 
made her read aloud what he had dictated, scolded 
her, and declared that she had not understood him. 
She was crushed, and left the house determined 
never to return. But she thought better of it during 
the night, and, next morning, resumed her post. 
Little by little, Dostoyevsky became conscious that 
his Remington machine was a charming young girl 
and an ardent admirer of his genius. He confided 
his troubles to her and she pitied him. In her girl- 
ish dream, she had pictured him petted and pam- 
pered; instead, she saw a sick man, weary, badly 
fed, badly lodged, badly served, hunted down like 
a wild beast by merciless creditors, and ruthlessly 
exploited by selfish relatives. She conceived the 
idea of protecting Dostoyevsky, of sharing the 
heavy burden he had taken upon his shoulders, and 
of comforting him in his sorrows. She was not in 





Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Text 97 


love with this man, who was more than twenty- 
five years her senior, but she understood his beau- 
tiful soul and reverenced his genius. She deter- 
mined to save Dostoyevsky from his publishers, and 
succeeded. She begged him to prolong the hours of 
dictation, spent the night copying out what she had 
taken down in the day, and worked with such good- 
will that, to the chagrin of the avaricious publisher, 
the novel was ready on the appointed day. And, 
shortly afterwards, he married her. 

And now, fifteen years afterwards—the funeral 
was on the anniversary of the wedding—Dostoyey- 
sky is dying! 

‘He made us come into the room,’ his daughter 
says, ‘and, taking our little hands in his, he begged 
my mother to read the Parable of the Prodigal Son. 
He listened with his eyes closed, absorbed in his 
thoughts. “My children,” he said in his feeble 
voice, “never forget what you have just heard. Have 
absolute faith in God and never despair of His par- 
don. I love you dearly, but my love is nothing 
compared with the love of God for all those He has 
created. Even if you should be so unhappy as to 
commit a crime in the course of your life, never de- 
spair of God. You are His children; humble your- 
selves before Him, as before your father, implore 
His pardon, and He will rejoice over your repent- 
ance, as the father rejoiced over that of the Prodi- 
gal Son.” ’ 

A few minutes later Dostoyevsky passed trium- 


98 A Faggot of Torches 


phantly away. ‘I have been present,’ says Aimee 
Dostoyevsky, ‘at many deathbeds, but none was so 
radiant as that of my father. He saw without fear 
the end approaching. His was a truly Christian 
death. He was ready.to appear before his Eternal 
Father hoping that, to recompense him for ail that 
he had suffered in this life, God would give him an- 
other great work to do, another gredt task to accom- 
plish.’ 
III 

Now before we turn on tiptoe from this silent 
room, let us examine, reverently and carefully, the 
faded and battered New Testament lying at the 
dead man’s side—the Testament from which, a few 
moments ago, the mother read in brave but broken 
accents the story of the Prodigal Son. It has a his- 
tory; and that history may reveal much of what 
we wish to know. 

For this man, who has just died so restfully, has 
looked death in the face before. His career is as 
romantic as his novels; indeed, his novels are, in the 
main, a reflection of his career. As a small boy he 
revels in historical romances—particularly those of 
Sir Walter Scott—and he enters so vividly into the 
thrilling experiences of the various characters that 
he often faints with the volume clasped in his hands. 
He is fond, too, of the open air. ‘AIl my life,’ he 
says, ‘I have loved the forest, with its mushrooms, 
its fruits, its insects, its birds, and its squirrels; I 
revelled in the scent of its damp leaves, Even at 





Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Text 99 


this moment, as I write, I can smell the aroma of 
the birches.” As a young fellow, he interests him- 
self in the welfare of his country; he joins a society 
that meets to discuss public questions; and, at the 
age of twenty-eight, is arrested for meddling with 
such matters. With thirty-three others he is 
charged with conspiracy, and, after a hurried trial, 
is sentenced to death. The condemned men after- 
wards discover that the sentence was a grim jest on 
the part of the Czar and his lheutenants, who 
thought, by this expedient, to frighten them. 

On a bitter morning, with the temperature many 
degrees below freezing point, they are led to the 
scaffold; their ordinary clothes are exchanged for 
shrouds; and thus, nearly naked, they are compelled 
to stand for half an hour whilst the burial service is 
being slowly read. Facing them, stand the soldiers 
with their muskets. A pile of coffins is stacked sug- 
gestively in a corner of the yard. At the last mo- 
ment, with the muskets actually at the shoulders of 
the guards, a white flag is waved, and it is an- 
nounced that the Czar has commuted the sentence 
to one of ten years’ exile in Siberia. Several of the 
prisoners lost their reason under the strain; several 
others died shortly afterwards. Dostoyevsky passed 
courageously through the ordeal; but it affected his 
nerves; he never recalled the experience without a 
shudder, and he refers to it with horror in several 
of his books. 

On Christmas Eve, 1849, he commenced the 


100 A Faggot of Torches 


dreadful journey to Omsk, and remained in Siberia 
‘like a man buried alive, nailed down in his coffin.’ 
On his arrival in that desolate region, two women 
slip a New Testament into his hand, and, taking ad- 
vantage of a moment when the officer’s back is 
turned, whisper to him to search it carefully at his 
leisure. Between the pages he finds a note for 
twenty-five roubles. The money is a vast comfort 
to him: but the New Testament itself proves an in- 
finitely vaster one. 

His daughter tells us that, during his exile, that 
Testament was his only solace. ‘He studied the 
precious volume from cover to cover; pondered 
every word; learned much of it by heart; and never 
forgot it. All his works are saturated with it, and 
it is this which gives them their power. Many of 
his admirers have said to me that it was a strange 
chance that ordained that my father should have 
only the gospels to read during the most important. 
and formative years of his life. But was it a’ 
chance? Is there such a thing as chance in our 
lives? The work of Jesus is not finished; in each 
generation He chooses His disciples, signs to them 
to follow Him, and gives them the same power over 
the human heart that He gave to the poor fishermen 
of Galilee.” Aimee Dostoyevsky believed that it 
was by that divine hand that the Testament was 
presented to her father that day. ‘Throughout his 
life,’ she adds, ‘he would never be without his old 
prison Testament, the faithful friend that had con- 


Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Text IOI 


soled him in the darkest hours of his life. He al- 
ways took it with him on his travels and kept it in 
a drawer of his writing-table, within reach of his 
hand. He consulted it in all the important mo- 
ments of his life,’ and, as we have seen, it was his 
comfort in the hour of death. 


IV 

Tt was in Siberia that Dostoyevsky discovered the 
beauty of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Siberia 
was the far country. It was there that he saw the 
prodigal among the husks and the swine. His com- 
panions were the lowest of the low and the vilest 
of the vile. ‘Imagine,’ he says, ‘an old crazy wooden 
building that should long ago have been broken up 
as useless. In the summer it is unbearably hot, in 
the winter unbearably cold. All the boards are rot- 
ten. On the ground filth lies an inch thick; every 
instant one is in danger of slipping. The small win- 
dows are so frozen over that even by day one can 
scarcely read; the ice on the panes ‘is three inches 
thick. We are packed like herrings in a barrel. 
The atmosphere is intolerable; the prisoners stink 
like pigs; there are vermin by the bushel; we sleep 
upon bare boards.’ And, in the midst of this dis- 
gusting and degrading scene, I catch a glimpse of 
Dostoyevsky. At first glance he is by no means an 
attractive figure. He is small and slender, round- 
shouldered and thick-necked. He is clothed in con- 
vict motley, one leg black, the other grey; the col- 


102 A Faggot of Torches 


ours of his coat likewise divided; his head half- 
shaved and bent forward in deep thought. His face 
is half the face of a Russian peasant and half the 
face of a dejected criminal. He is shy, taciturn, 
rather ugly, and extremely awkward. He has a 
flattened nose; small piercing eyes under eyelashes 
which tremble with nervousness; and a long thick 
untidy beard with fair hair. The stamp of his epi- 
lepsy is distinctly upon him. We see all this at a 
glance, and the glance is not alluring. But Nekras- 
sov, the poet, has given us the picture as the con- 
victs saw it. In this picture Dostoyevsky appears 
almost sublime. He moves among his fellow-pris- 
oners with his New Testament in his hand, telling 
them its stories and reading to them its words of 
comfort and grace. He seems to them a kind of 
prophet, gently rebuking their blasphemies and ex- 
cesses, and speaking to them of poetry, of science, 
of God, and of the love of Christ. It is his way of 
pointing the prodigal to the path that leads to the 
Father’s heart and the Father’s home. 


Vv 


For this was the treasure that he found in that. 
New Testament! This was the beauty of the story 
of the Prodigal Son! It revealed the way to the 
Father. ‘One sees the truth more clearly when one 
is unhappy,’ he writes from Siberia. ‘And yet God 
gives me moments of perfect peace; in such mo- 





Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Text 103 


ments I love and. believe that I am loved; in such 
moments I have formulated my creed, wherein all is 
clear and holy to me. This creed is extremely sim- 
ple: here it is. I believe that there is nothing love- 
lier, deeper, more sympathetic, more rational, more 
manly and more perfect than the Saviour; I say to 
myself with jealous love that not only is there no 
one else like Him, but that there could be no one. 
I would even say more; if anyone could prove to me 
that Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth 
really did exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay 
with Christ and not with truth!’ Alexander Pusch- 
kin has a poem about a poor knight who, in a mo- 
ment of supreme exaltation, sees the Holy Virgin 
at the foot of the Cross. Dostoyevsky was very 
fond of the poem; whenever he read it, his face was 
radiated, his voice trembled, his eyes filled with 
tears. ‘For it was,’ his daughter says, ‘the story of 
his own soul. He, too, was a poor knight; he, too, 
had a beatific vision; but it was not the medizval 
Virgin who appeared to him, but Christ who came 
to him in his prison and called him to follow Him.’ 








Christ no one like Christ! 
Christ the Saviour! 
Christ the way to the Father! 





On his bended knees Dostoyevsky blessed God 
for sending him into the Siberian steppes. For it 
was amidst those stern and awful solitudes that he 
found the road that leads to the Father’s home. 


104 A Faggot of Torches 


VI 

That old prison Testament, and the revelation 
that it brought to him, were in his thoughts through 
all the years that followed. We catch fitful glimpses 
of the battered volume in all his writings. I pick 
up The Possessed, and I find, near the close of the 
book, as the story draws to its climax, that Stepan 
Trofimovitch is taken ill and Sofya Matveyevna sits 
by his couch, reading. And what is she reading? 
She is reading two striking passages from the New 
Testament! 

And in Crime and Punishment there is a really 
tremendous scene. In his article on Dostoyevsky 
in the Encyclopedia Britannica, Mr. Thomas Sec- 
combe, M.A., declares that, for poignancy and emo- 
tional intensity, there is nothing in modern litera-— 
ture to equal it. It describes Raskolnikoff, the con- 
science-stricken and self-tormented murderer, creep- 
ing at dead of night to the squalid waterside hovel 
in which Sonia lives. Sonia is part of the flotsam 
and jetsam of the city’s wreckage. The relation- 
ship between these two was a relationship of sym- 
pathy; each had sinned terribly ; and each had sinned 
for the sake of others rather than for self. Ona 
rickety little table in Sonia’s room stands a tallow 
candle fixed in an improvised candlestick of twisted 
metal. In the course of earnest conversation, Sonia 
glances at a book lying on a chest of drawers. He 
takes it down. It is a New Testament. He hands 
it to Sonia and begs her to read it to him. ‘Sonia 


Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Text 105 


opens the book; her hands tremble; the words stick 
in her throat. Twice she tries without being able 
to utter a syllable.” At length she succeeds. And 
then 

‘She closes the book: she seems afraid to raise her 
eyes on Raskolnikoff: her feverish trembling con- 
tinues. The dying piece of candle dimly lights up 
this low-ceilinged room in which an assassin and a 
harlot have just read the Book of Books!’ 

This is in the middle of the story. On the last 
page, when Raskolnikoff and Sonia have both been 
purified by suffering, Raskolnikoff is still cherishing 
in his prison cell the New Testament which, at his 
earnest request, Sonia has brought him. 

Here is Raskolnikoff—a Prodigal Son! 

Here is Sonia—a Prodigal Daughter! 

Here is the Book of Books—pointing the prodi- 
gals to the Father's House! 

The candle in Sonia’s wretched room burned 
lower and lower, and at last sputtered out. But the 
candle that, in that Siberian prison, was lit in Dos- 
toyevsky’s soul, grew taller and taller the longer it 
burned. Like the path of the just, which shineth 
more and more unto the perfect day, its light waxed 
brighter and clearer. It flung its radiance right 
around the world: it found a reflection in the glow- 
ing lives of thousands; it lit up Dostoyevsky’s death 
chamber with the glory of a great hope; and it il- 
lumined his flight to that Celestial City in which they 
need neither candle nor sun. } 





IX 
JOHN HAMPDEN’S TEXT 


I 


No man ever had as many claims upon the grateful 
homage of his countrymen as John Hampden; no 
man occupies a more enviable place in history. He 
represents our English Puritanism at its very best. 
In him it flowered; he is its most finished product. 
He was an aristocrat of the spiritual, as well as of 
the social and intellectual, realms. In Puritanism’s 
golden age, he is its most courtly, its most cultured, 
its most devout, and its most engaging figure. In 
contrast with the experience of most men, his piety 
deepened as his power increased; his goodness be- 
came more marked as his greatness became more 
evident; his fearless and commanding statesman- 
ship was only equalled by his exquisite simplicity. 
Historians like Clarendon, unrivalled in the analysis 
of character, regard him as the mightiest man of his 
time; writers like Richard Baxter, eminent both for 
devotion and scholarship, speak of him as the best. 
In his Saimts’ Everlasting Rest, Baxter enumerates 
the pleasures that he hopes to enjoy in the world to 
come; and, conspicuously among them, he mentions 
the delight of meeting the excellent John Hampden. 
Many years afterwards he amplified the eulogy. 
“‘T remember,’ he says, ‘a moderate prudent old gen- 
106 


John Hampden’s Text 107 


tleman who told me that, if he might choose what 
person he would be in the world, he would be John 
Hampden.’ 

Few men are really missed. However prominent 
the place that they have filled, they fall, and, in pub- 
lic life, are soon forgotten. The surge of affairs 
closes over them, as the waves close over a stately 
vessel that has foundered in mid-ocean. But Hamp- 
den is the exception. No man ever left such an 
obvious blank in the national life as he did. Clar-_ 
endon declares that, if their whole army had been 
annihilated, the consternation of the Parliamentar- 
ians could not have been greater. Nor was the grief 
confined to his own party. Although he lost his 
life in resisting the arbitrary assumptions of the 
throne, no man was more sorry than the King to 
hear of Hampden’s death. For the King knew 
Hampden; he admired and trusted him; and he 
built his hopes for the days to come on the prospect 
of seeing so wise, so just, and so good a man in 
power. During the engagement in which he fell, 
Hampden wore upon his breast a locket bearing the 
inscription 

Against my king I never fight, 
But for my king and, country’s right. 

The official chronicle of the period contains a record 
of his death which, when we reflect that the man 
to whom it refers died in leading the revolutionary 
forces, seems amazing. ‘The loss of Colonel Hamp- 
den,’ it says, ‘goeth near the heart of every man 


108 A Faggot of Torches 


that loves the good of his king and country. The 
memory of this deceased colonel is such that, in 
every age to come, it will more and more be had 
in honour and esteem; a man so religious, and of 
that prudence, judgement, temper, valour, and in- 
tegrity, that he hath left few his like behind him.’ 
The loss, indeed, seemed irreparable. In compari- 
son with Hampden, Cromwell appeared ‘a rugged 
and clownish soldier,’ incapable of high command. 
And, as the official record predicted, time, so far 
from healing the wound, merely accentuated the loss 
that the nation had sustained. Years afterwards, 
“as Macaulay says, ‘England sadly missed the so- 
briety, the self-command, the perfect soundness of 
judgement, the perfect rectitude of intention, to 
which the history of revolutions furnishes no par- 
allel or furnishes a parallel in Washington alone.’ 
“How are we to account for this extraordinary com- 
bination of transcendent gifts and graces? It is not 
difficult. Come with me! 


II 

And here we are, in the early spring of 1603, 
sauntering down a bridle-path that winds its way 
through one of the most entrancing and picturesque 
valleys in the county of Buckingham. The great 
beech-woods stretch away in every direction, diver- 
sified here and there by patches of box and juni- 
per. The song of the birds is almost deafening; 
whilst the wild flowers drape every bank and knoll 


John Hampden’s Text 109 


with beauty. Every now and again we come on 
delightful dells in which ferns run riot and prim- 
roses twinkle. But, look! Away there, on the 
crest of a distant hill, we catch our first glimpse of 
one of the stateliest homes of England. It is ap- 
proached by glorious avenues of poplars, oaks, and 
elms. This is the home of the Hampdens. The old 
mansion, like so many of its kind, is a medley of 
architecture. If you walk around its walls and 
windows, examining its arches and gables, the stones 
will become garrulous and will gossip to you of the 
Normans, the Plantagenets, and the Tudors. How- 
ever long you live, you will never forget your visit 
to this charming spot. For, as Lord Nugent says, 
no one who has a heart for high and breezy hills, 
for green glades enclosed within the shadowy still- 
ness of ancient woods, for avenues leading to a 
noble house on whose walls the centuries have writ- 
ten their story; no one who loves such things can 
visit the residence of Hampden and not do justice 
to the love which its master bore it, and to that 
stronger feeling which could lead him from such an 
idyllic retirement to the toils and perils to which he 
entirely devoted his life. 

But, beautiful as all this is, I have something 
still more beautiful to show you. You ask me, 
naturally enough, as to the present owner of this 
ancestral home. The owner is a child. He was 
born in 1594—six years after the defeat of the 
Armada—so that he is now a boy of nine. Here he 


110 A Faggot of Torches 


is, sprawling on the hearthrug, his fine head, with 
its piercing eyes and its shock of brown hair, rest- 
ing on his mother’s knee. He wears a velvet suit 
with silk stockings and silver buckles. They are 
great companions, these two. He loves to hear his 
mother tell of the coming of the Spanish galleons, 
of the anxiety that brooded over the nation as it 
approached, and of the delirious joy of the famous 
victory. She would tell him of Drake and Hawkins 
and Frobisher, and all the redoubtable heroes of 
that stirring time. She had known them well; had 
not Sir Francis kissed her boy’s forehead just be- 
fore sailing on his last voyage? But, within a few 
months of the child’s birth, they had all passed 
away. And so had her husband; he and Sir Fran- 
cis Drake died at about the same time; and, at the 
age of three, this boy in the velvet suit was left 
the heir to this glorious estate. You ask me why, 
this evening, his face seems overcast. Is it some sad 
story that his mother is telling him? It is. She 1s 
telling him that the Queen—the most romantic of 
all his boyish heroines—is dead! The spacious 
times of great Elizabeth are over. She reminds him 
that his grandfather, old Griffith Hampden, once 
entertained the good Queen in this very house, and 
cut the great drive through the woods—the Queen’s 
Gap—specially for her approach. It was in the 

“course of these heart-to-heart talks between the 
young mother and her infant son that the founda- 
tions of his character were laid. 


John Hampden’s Text III 


III 

For he is living in great times, this boy with the 
velvet suit and silver buckles. He was not quite 
three when Sir Francis Drake died; he was nine 
when the great Queen went to her rest; he was ten 
in the days of the Gunpowder Plot; he was seven- 
teen when the Authorized Version of the Bible was 
translated, twenty-two when Shakespeare died, 
twenty-four when Sir Walter Raleigh was executed, 
and was twenty-six when the Mayflower sailed. The 
following year he himself entered Parliament. 

These were the formative and plastic years of 
Hampden’s life, and the thoughtful and impres- 
sionable youth felt to the full the influence of these 
historic events. But something greater still was 
happening in England; and it was this that affected 
him most of all. For it was whilst John Hampden 
was lying in his cradle that the Bible achieved its 
greatest triumph in English hearts and English 
homes. Of a sudden, the whole nation gave itself to 
the reading of the old Geneva Bible, and, as a con- 
sequence, the life of the nation was transfigured. . 
Green says that neither our nation nor any other 
ever experienced so remarkable a change. The 
people became the people of a single book. The 
words, falling on ears which custom had not dead- 
ened, awoke a startling enthusiasm. It was in this 
atmosphere that Puritanism was born; and it was 
this atmosphere that enfolded like a perfume the 
boyhood of John Hampden. 4 


112 A Faggot of Torches 


Many an evening mother and son spent together 
over the Bible stories. The boys—for John had a 
younger brother—were never tired of Abraham’s 
wonderful pilgrimage, of Lot’s flight from the 
burning cities, of Jacob’s ladder of light, of Jo- 
seph’s coat of many colours, of Moses in the ark of 
bulrushes, of Samson and the Philistines, of Gid- 
eon and the Bedouins, of Samuel’s midnight call, of 
David and Goliath, of Daniel in the den of lions, of 
Belshazzar’s feast, of the three Hebrew children in 
the burning fiery furnace, nor of the wonderful 
story from the New Testament, the sweetest story 
of all. It is remarkable how these stories rushed 
back upon his mind in the stirring days that fol- 
lowed. Thus I find him writing, at the age of thirty- 
seven, to Sir John Eliot. Sir John is troubled be- 
cause his elder son has set his heart on going to 
France; the father dreads lest his boy should fall 
under pernicious influences there. John Hampden 
bids him be of good comfort. The father has done 
his best for the lad; let him leave the rest in higher 
hands. “Then shall he be sure to find in France 
Him whom Abraham found in Sychem, and whom 
Joseph found in Egypt, under whose wing alone is 
perfect safety.’ 

Then, having read to the boys their story, she 
taught them a verse from the Psalms. As Mr. 
Prothero, in his Psalms in Human Life, points out, 
‘the Psalter was, to the Puritans, the book of books. 
Psalms were sung at Lord Mayor’s feasts and city 


John Hampden’s Text 113 


banquets. Soldiers sang them on the march, by the 
camp fire, on parade, in the storm of battle. The 
ploughman carolled them over his furrows; the 
carter hummed them by the side of his wagon. 
They were the song-books of ladies and their lov- 
ers; and, if Shakespeare is to be trusted, they were 
_ even sung to hornpipes at rustic festivals.’ From the 
Psalms, therefore, the boys learn their verses. This 
evening the lesson is from the forty-first. ‘I said, 
O Lord, be merciful unto me; heal my soul, for I 
have sinned against Thee. The boys repeat the 
words after her once or twice; and then, when they 
can say them without a mistake, they throw their 
arms about their mother’s neck, kiss her, and 
scamper off to bed. 

His Mother! His Bible! 

Aits Bible! His Mother! 

Oh, the debt that we Britons owe to British 
mothers and to British Bible! 


IV 


He was only a boy in those days, and he learned 
the words with a light and merry heart. But there 
came stern and terrible days—days of tumult and 
bloodshed and imprisonment—in which those same 
words rushed back upon his mind and spoke to him 
in very different accents. In those selfsame simple 
words he afterwards discovered wonders that, as a 
boy at his mother’s knee, he never for a moment 
suspected. 


II4 A Faggot of Torches 


‘I said, Lord, be merciful to me; heal my soul, for 
I have sinned against Thee’ 

It is the Pemtent bowing in the True Confes- 
sional; it is the Patient lying in the Noblest Hospi- 
tal; it is the Prisoner standing before the Highest 
Tribunal. | 

The Penitent cries: I have sinned! Against Thee, 
Thee only, I have sinned! 

The Patient cries: Heal, O Lord, heal my soul! 

The Prisoner cries: Be merciful! Be merciful! 

Every sin is an affront to the Majesty of Heaven, 
and, as such, calls for contrite confession. ‘fF have 
sinned against Thee! It is a personal insult to the 
Most High; it is a clenched fist upraised in the face 
of God; it is the bitter answer of earth’s hate to 
heaven’s eternal love. 

Every sin is a violation of the divine law. Itisa 
defiance of the divine authority. The. outraged 
commandment demands vindication; the mandates 
of omnipotence cannot be broken with impunity. 
‘Be merciful, cries the guilty and convicted rebel, 
‘be merciful to me? 

Every sin is a self-inflicted gash on the simner’s 
own soul. Its vitality is reduced; its resistance is 
weakened ; its health is impaired; it is wounded and 
in pain. ‘Heal my soul! 

‘I said, Lord, be merciful unto me; heal my soul, 
for I have sinned against Thee.’ 

Happy the man who comes forth from the solemn 
hush of that Confessional with the great, glad 


John Hampden’s Text lis 


words of absolution ringing in his ravished ears! 
Happy the man who leaves that Hospital rejoicing 
in the healing of his soul, in the restoration of his 
powers, in the fulness and vigour of health! Happy 
the man who departs from that Tribunal with the 
clemency and acquittal of the Court! 

Absolved! 

Healed! 

Discharged! 

Into this threefold transport John Hampden en- 
tered. I cannot fix the exact date at which the 
words that he learned that evening at his mother’s 
knee came back to him with such new and vivid 
force. He was quite a young man when the great 
change came over him. ‘In his entrance into the 
world,’ says Lord Clarendon, ‘he indulged himself 
in all the sports and exercises and company which 
were used by men of the most jolly conversation. 
On a sudden, however, from a life of great gaiety 
he retired to extraordinary sobriety and strictness, 
to a more reserved and melancholy society.’ It may 
have been then that he found himself breathing the 
Pemitent’s prayer for absolution, uttering the Pa- 
tient’s cry for healing, and presenting the Prisoner’s 
plea for mercy. 

‘I said, Lord, be merciful unto me; heal my soul, 
for I have sinned against Thee.’ 

It was then, at any rate, that the spirit of John 
Hampden was born anew; and, thus re-born, he en- 
tered upon his illustrious and invaluable career. 


116 A Faggot of Torches 


V 


All the historians agree that, in the days that 
immediately followed, there were moments when 
the destinies of England trembled in the balance. 
The throne was tottering; the institutions of na- 
tional life were in the melting-pot; everything was 
at risk. In that crisis, the issue hung upon Hamp- 
den. ‘The eyes of all men,’ as Clarendon says, “were 
fixed upon him as the pilot that must steer the vessel 
through the tempests and rocks which threatened it. 
And I am persuaded that his authority and interest 
and his power of wisely governing the people, were 
greater now than any man’s in his time or any 
time.’ ‘We can scarcely express,’ says Macaulay, 
‘the admiration that we feel for a mind so great. 
Almost every part of this virtuous and blameless 
life is a precious and splendid portion of our na- 
tional history.’ 

Few pages in our annals are more affecting than 
those which describe the death of Hampden. With 
his head bending down, and his hands resting on his 
horse’s neck, he was seen riding off the field before 
the action was done—‘a thing,’ says Lord Claren- 
don, ‘he never used to do, and from which it was 
concluded that he was hurt.’ He turned his horse’s 
head towards the lovely home at which he had 
wooed and won the bride of his youth; but, cut off 
by hostile troops, he changed his mind and rode in 
another direction. His strength fast failing, he 


John Hampden’s Text 117 


was taken to a cottager’s home to die. For six 
days he occupied himself, though in excruciating 
agony, in giving instructions concerning the dis- 
posal of public affairs. Just before the end he took 
the Lord’s Supper, and then, thoroughly spent, he 
turned his face to the wall that he might die in 
prayer. 

‘O Lord of Hosts,’ he was heard to’ say, ‘great is 
Thy mercy; just and holy are Thy dealings with 
us sinful men. Pardon, O Lord, my manifold 
transgressions. O Lord, save my bleeding country. 
Have these realms in Thy special keeping. Let the 
King see his error; and turn the hearts of his coun- 
cillors from the malice and wickedness of their de- 
signs. Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!’ 

There was a pause. And then, in a feebler voice, 
he continued: ‘O Lord, save my country; O Lord, 
be merciful to ? But here speech failed him. He 
fell back in the bed and expired. 

‘O Lord, be merciful to ’ The old prayer— 
the Penitent’s prayer for absolution; the Patient's 
cry for healing; the Prisoner’s plea for mercy— 
was with him to the last. 

‘I said, O Lord, be merciful to me; heal my soul, 
for I have sinned against Thee.’ 

It is one of those prayers that has been offered a 
thousand thousand times, and never once in vain. 








x 
JOHN KEBLE’S TEXT 


I 

JouN Keste cherished in his heart a golden secret, 
and, after discovering its unutterable value, he spent 
all his days in trying to impart it. He saturated his 
soul with the stillness and peace of the Gloucester- 
shire village in which he was born, As soon as his 
college days were done, he astounded all his. ad- 
mirers by tossing to the winds the splendid pros- 
pects that were opening before him in order that he 
might go back to his old home at Fairford to. be- 
come his father’s curate. It seemed incredible, as 
Dean Church says, that the most distinguished aca- 
demic of his day—honoured and envied by everyone 
—should retire from Oxford at the height of his 
fame to busy himself with a few hundred of Glou- 
cestershire peasants in a miserable curacy! But 
John Keble knew what he was doing. He had nour- 
ished his inner life on the quietude of the country- 
side. The fragrance of the clover, the silver purity 
of the brook, the sweetness of the hedgerows, the 
sparkle of the dew-drenched meadows, and the song 
of the thrushes in the copse had woven themselves 
into the very fabric of his being. 

Let me point him out to you! There he sits under 
the shelter of an immense beech-tree, watching the 

118 


John Keble’s Text 119 


partridges scurrying hither and thither on the oppo- 
site bank. He is not exactly a handsome man, al- 
though his open countenance, his noble forehead 
and his beautiful hair go a long way towards aton- 
ing for any defects you discover in his figure. His 
fine eyes are full of playfulness, of intelligence, and 
of deep feeling. They seem to read you through 
and through; and detect your meaning before you 
have expressed yourself in words. His unaffected 
simplicity, his genuine humility, his charming inno- 
cence and utter unworldliness are written unmis- 
takably upon his countenance. And yet, although 
a smile seems to be perpetually playing about his 
lips, there is deep gravity in his expression and 
even an element of sadness. For John Keble is 
worried. 

He is worried about the world. It seems to him, 
as he strolls across these golden cornfields and saun- 
ters down these leafy lanes, that the people of Eng- 
land are steeped in the lethargy of a deadly indif- 
ference, whilst the Church is engrossed in fierce and 
bitter controversies. What can he do to mend mat- 
ters? It would be useless for him to fulminate 
against the evils of his time: such a course would 
only add to the babel of discordant voices. He 
learned in the stillness a more excellent way. 

John Keble always reminds me of Elisha. When | 
Elisha was asked to cleanse the tainted stream that 
was working such havoc in the city, he saw at once 
that it could never be purified by taking something 


120 A Faggot of Torches 


from it. He must add something to it. He threw 
salt into the fountains and the waters were healed. 
John Keble had the wisdom to see that it would be 
useless, and worse than useless, to cry out against 
the apathy of the world and the schisms of the 
Church. He felt that he must do something construc- 
tive, something positive. He must heal the waters 
by adding to them some purifying power. If only 
he could cultivate, amidst the green, green fields of 
Fairford, the intimate friendship of Jesus! If only 
he could develop within himself a soul of ineffable 
sweetness and trustfulness and grace! And then— 
if only he could pour the secret treasure of his soul 
into the troubled and disturbed life of his country! 
If only he could! And he did! : 


II 


As he crossed and re-crossed: the village green at 
Fairford, and moved up and down those country 
roads, he meditated on the themes that, in the course 
of the Church’s calendar, would demand: his atten- 
tion on the coming Sunday. A born poet, his 
thoughts struggled to express themselves in verse; 
and, as soon as he reached the parsonage, he pen- 
cilled down the poems that had imparted an added 
delight to his walk. The manuscripts grew in num- 
ber until he had a poem for every day of the 
Church’s year. His friends got to hear of them 
and pressed him to publish. In 1823 he showed 
them to Thomas Arnold, afterwards the famous 


John Keble’s Text 121 


headmaster of Rugby. ‘It is my firm opinion,’ said 
Arnold, ‘that nothing equal to these poems exists 
in our language. The wonderful knowledge of 
Scripture, the purity of heart and the richness of 
thought that they exhibit, I never saw paralleled.’ 
Thus encouraged, a new idea seized upon Keble’s 
mind. Perhaps this bundle of manuscripts was the 
cruse of salt by means of which the tainted waters 
were to be healed! Perhaps it was through this 
channel that he was to pour the treasure of his own 
soul into the life of his country! He decided to 
publish anonymously, the verses that all the world 
now know as The Christian Year. As the keynote 
of the work, he decided to inscribe a text upon the 
title-page, and he never hesitated for a moment as 
to what the text should be. It was the text that 
had been singing itself over and over in his soul 
during all his rambles amidst those delicious soli- 
tudes of his. It is the text that is inscribed upon his 
monument at Westminster Abbey. In returning 
and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in con- 
fidence shall be your strength. 

‘It is the chief purpose of these pages,’ he says 
in the foreword, ‘to exhibit a soothing tendency.’ 
The word is eminently characteristic of him. ‘I woo 
the soothing art,’ he says in one place; and, in others, 
he speaks of the soothing power of Nature and the 
soothing calm of the Communion service. It 
seemed to him that the world was fevered and 
needed soothing. If only he could soothe it! Per- 


122 A Faggot of Torches 


haps the poems would achieve that end! He says of 
them that 
. . their cherished haunt hath been 

By streamlet, violet bank and orchard green 

*Mid lonely views and scenes of common earth. 
The fact that, during the poet’s lifetime, the book 
went through nearly two hundred editions—total- 
ling a hundred and fifty thousand copies—suffi- 
ciently proved that, in The Christian Vear, he had 
given the world the antidote that its malady re- 
quired. The world needed saving; it needed 
strengthening; it needed soothing. And Keble’s 
message met its every need. In returning and rest 
shall ye be saved ; in quietness and in confidence shall 
be your strength. 

He lived to be an old man and his life grew in 
beauty as the years rolled by. ‘Everybody loved 
him,’ says Sir John Taylor Coleridge, who, after 
enjoying his intimate friendship for fifty-five years, 
became his biographer, ‘everybody loved him, and 
loved him with the best kind of love. Loving him 
was like loving goodness itself; you felt that what 
was good in him was bringing into life all that was 
best in you.’ There are few things in our literature 
more touching than the way in which, after thirty 
years of perfect wedded life, John Keble and his 
wife set out together on life’s last journey. She 
was on her death-bed when the call came to him. 
They wheeled him from her room into the next, 
husband: and wife giving each other a fond but 


John Keble’s Text 123 


silent glance of farewell. His spirit was the first to 
pass. The news was broken to her and she smiled. 
She bade the family kneel round her bed and give 
thanks that he had been spared the sorrow of sur- 
viving her. And then she, too, breathed out her 
soul to God, and the new-made grave of John Keble 
opened to receive her. In death as in life, they 
found strength in the stillness. In returning and 
rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence 
shall be your strength. 
III | 

Every visitor to the city of Wittenberg makes a 
point of inspecting two very old and very famous 
houses. The one is the house of Martin Luther; 
the other is the house of Philip Melancthon. Tour- 
ists passing from the one to the other are met by a 
stream of sightseers who are viewing the two 
houses in the opposite order. The path that is daily 
trodden by these reverent pilgrims was worn by the 
feet of the two friends four centuries ago. Their 
souls were knit together as the souls of David and 
Jonathan. Together they laboured; together they 
were laid to rest at last. In the old Castle Church 
at Wittenberg—the church on whose door Luther 
nailed his famous theses—the two reformers sleep 
in One grave. 

Luther and Melancthon had much in common. 
Among other things, they resembled each other in 
this respect: each had a text inscribed upon his 
house. On the house of Martin Luther, you will 


vat 





124 A Faggot of Torches 


see a text from the Old Testament; on the house of 
Philip Melancthon, you will see a text from the 
New. In that circumstance there is something sin- 
gularly characteristic. The words on Philip Me- 
lancthon’s house are these: If God be for us who 
can be against us? And the words on Luther’s? 
Come with me! 

Luther’s house is entered by a richly-carved por- 
tal. On either side is a stone seat, and, over the 
seat, a canopy. On the one canopy you see a por- 
trait of Luther; on the other his arms are engraved. 
Round the arms are the five letters V.I.V.I.T.—He 
lives!' They reflect Luther’s exultant faith in the 
living presence and ultimate triumph of his risen 
Lord. On the opposite canopy, round the portrait 
is this text: In returning and rest shall ye be saved; 
im quietness and in confidence shall be your strength. 
“Those words,’ Luther used to say, ‘were an exceed- 
ing comfort to me.’ 


IV 


One of the most stirring sermons ever preached 
on this text—Keble’s text—Luther’s text—has been 
preached by Mr. Harold Begbie. It is in the form 
of a novel and is called Racket and Rest. The title 
speaks for itself. Two women figure conspicuously 
in the book. One of them is the wife of the hero; 
the other is his mother. The wife represents racket; 
the mother represents rest. Dolly, the wife, leaving 
her husband and child, pursues a hectic career upon 


John Keble’s Text 125 


the stage. Her life is one wild flutter of excitement. 
And, all through the book, the gentle old lady in 
the background murmurs her message of rest. She 
prays that, like Ruth, Dolly may ‘find rest in the 
house of her husband.’ ‘Every morning and night,’ 
Mr. Begbie says, ‘she prayed for the guidance of 
God. She loved to read of The Great Rest Giver. 
She found it more and more difficult to understand 
Dolly. There was no comparison between Racket 
and Rest, only a monstrous contrast. Dolly’s lack 
of calm was shocking to the placid soul of this noble 
old lady who bowed morning and night in thank- 
fulness to the Giver of Rest. But Rest conquered 
Racket in the end. 

Dolly is suddenly seized with ear trouble. An 
operation leaves her stone deaf. She returns, chas- 
tened by suffering, to her husband’s home. His 
constancy is the wonder of all her days. She finds 
her child, Dorothea, grown into a tall and graceful 
girl, Shortly afterwards the old lady lies down to 
die. Dolly feels that she cannot bear to let the tran- 
quil spirit go without learning the secret of her rest- 
ful and beautiful life. 

‘T want very much to hear you speak,’ she says, 
‘but I cannot. You don’t know how greatly I long 
to hear your voice.’ She bent and kissed the widow’s 
hand. ‘When I could hear you,’ she said, ‘I would 
not listen. This is my punishment. But you can 
hear me, and I want to tell you that I am sorry for 
all the rude things I ever. said to you, and very 


126 A Faggot of Torches 


sorry for all the unkind things I ever thought about 
you.’ She kissed her hand again. 

The widow’s eyes were full of the bright light of 
kindness. Her lips opened, and she said softly: 
‘In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness 
and in confidence shall be your strength. 

“You are speaking, and I cannot hear you,’ said 
Dolly, lifting her trumpet. 

The widow stretched out her hands, drew Dolly 
down to her, and kissed her brow. 

‘It would be difficult for you to make me hear,’ 
Dolly said, putting away the trumpet. There were 
tears in her eyes. For the first time in her life, she 
felt the wisdom of goodness. The death of this 
beautiful old lady was without tears. Whatever 
mystery hung behind the dark curtain, it could not 
affright her. She had lived a good life, her heart 
was pure, her hands were clean, her eyes were full 
of,sweetness. The end of her life had come. Death 
was in the room. She was radiant with serenity. 
Dolly wondered why everybody did not think more 
often of their death. Death is so certain. Life 
flies away. It is wise to be good. ‘Will you tell 
Dorothea,’ she said, ‘when she is alone with you, so 
that she can tell me afterwards, how you managed 
in your training of Theodore? You were always 
kind and loving; but you were also wise and strict. 
I want to know how you managed. He loved you 
all through his boyhood, and yet you never spoilt 
him. You were a perfect mother. I want to be as 


John Keble’s Text 127 


like you as I can. Will you tell Dorothea? You 
have changed me.’ 

The widow took a pencil and tablet which rested 
on a table at her side, and wrote the words: ‘In re- 
turning and rest shall ye be saved; in quetness and 
in confidence shall be your strength.” Then she gave 
the paper to Dolly and smiled into her eyes. To- 
wards the end she called Dorothea to her side. 

“You have the secret, my dear,’ she said. ‘You 
are calm and restful. You must tell your mother. 
In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness 
and in confidence shall be your strength,’ They-as are 
the old lady’s last words. 


vV 


Here, then, framed in three distinct settings, is 
the text! We have seen it playing its part in the 
quietest and most tranquil soul that ever adorned a 
secluded English parsonage. We have seen it tak- 
ing its place in the life of the stormiest and most 
rugged soul by whom the world was ever shaken. 
And we have seen it quoted by Mr. Harold Begbie 
as the secret of the sweetness, charm and courage of 
one of his most engaging heroines. What is there 
in the text to account for three such striking testi- 
monies? The answer is that everything is in the 
text; everything, that is to say, that matters. 

_ For, after all, there are only two things in life 
that matter very much. The one is Salvation; the 
other is Strength. Half the world is asking: What 


128 A Faggot of Torches 


must I do to be saved? The other half is asking: 
What must I do to be strong? And the text— 
Keble’s text, Luther’s text, the little widow’s text— 
answers both questions. What must I do to be 
saved? In returning and rest shall ye be saved! 
There lies the first secret. 

What must I do to be strong? In quietness and 
tn confidence shall be your strength! There lies the 
second ! 

Strength always lies in quietness. That is why, 
in the days of our frailty, the doctor orders us away 
into the solitudes. The strong men, Carlyle declares, 
are invariably the silent men. 

Salvation always lies in returning. We get on by 
going back. That is why Jesus set a little child in 
the midst of His disciples and said: Except ye be 
converted and become as little children, ye shall not 
enter into the kingdom of heaven. That is why 
Jacob went back to Bethel and renewed his earlier 
vows. That is why the husband and wife whose 
felicity has become clouded must, at any cost, re- 
capture the spirit of their courtship: argument is 
worse than useless. That is why the minister who 
has lost his vision and his rapture must get back to 
the emotions with which he was ordained. Back! 
We must go back! Back to the simplicities! Back 
to the Cross! Back, like the prodigal, to the Father’s 
heart! It is always in returning that a confused 
soul finds salvation. 


XI 
JOHN COLERIDGE PATTESON’S TEXT 


I 


Everysopy felt, as they left the solemn old church 
in the soft and misty sunshine of that autumn af- 
ternoon, that the thronged and impressive service 
that they had just attended was destined to become 
historic. In that respect, everybody was right. But 
everybody fancied that it would derive its historic 
importance exclusively from the personality of the 
preacher. In that respect, everybody was wrong. 
The personality of the preacher was certainly arrest- 
ing and captivating; but if the worshippers had 
more closely scrutinized the large congregation they 
would have noticed a bright-eyed Eton schoolboy 
standing in the crowded aisle. Little as they might 
have suspected it, it is about the person of that Eton 
schoolboy that the historic interest of that memor- 
able service gathers. 

It is the last day of October, 1841. The ecclesi- 
astical dignitaries who control the policy of the 
Church of England have recently resolved upon a 
forward policy. The Church is to be imperialized. 
Bishops are to be appointed to evangelize the most 
remote dependencies of the Empire. The claims of 
the most distant outpost are to be first considered. 
It is announced in due course that the Rev. George 

129 


130 A Faggot of Torches 


Augustus Selwyn, who for several years has held 
the curacy at the Windsor Parish Church, has been 
selected as the pioneer Bishop of New Zealand. 
And, this afternoon, the youthful prelate is preach- 
ing his farewell sermon. The abundance of the sea 
shall be converted unto Thee; the forces also of the 
Gentiles shall come unto Thee—that was the text. 
As he outlined his ambitions amidst the strange and 
savage scenes towards which he was turning his 
face, the people who, to the end of life, cherished 
every memory of their young minister with a per- 
sonal and tender regard, leaned forward in strained 
and breathless silence. He hoped, he said, to estab- 
lish a vigorous and aggressive church upon those 
distant shores; and, if he succeeded in that, he 
would be content to die there, neglected and for- 
gotten. 

Did the preacher, I wonder, direct some special 
and appealing glances at the Eton schoolboy in the 
aisle? I do not know. I only know that nobody 
in that great congregation was more profoundly im- 
pressed than was he. ‘I was forced to stand all the 
time,’ he says, ‘but it was most affecting when he 
talked of going out to found a church and then to 
die neglected and forgotten. All the people burst 
out crying, he was so very much beloved by his 
parishioners. When he finished, I think I never 
heard anything like the sensation. I felt that, if it 
had not been so sacred a spot, all would have ex- 
claimed “God bless him.” ’ 


John Coleridge Patteson’s Text 13E 


The schoolboy—one of the most brilliant scholars 
at Eton and the popular captain of the school eleven 
—was John Coleridge Patteson. The impress of that 
service remained upon his spirit to his dying day. 
He walked out of the church that afternoon with 
but one dream, one ideal, one ambition. He, too, 
must tell earth’s scattered islands of the Saviour! 
The young bishop suspected the tumult that he had 
awakened in the young boy’s brain. “Lady Patte- 
son,’ he said, a day or two later, when he called to 
say good-bye, ‘I want you one of these days to give 
me Coley!’ Quite independently, Coley himself crept 
to his mother’s side and begged that he might one 
day be permitted to join Bishop Selwyn on the other 
side of the world. Lady Patteson promised that, if 
he held resolutely: to his purpose, she and Sir John 
would send him forth with their blessing. Fifteen 
years later, when Bishop Selwyn visited England, 
the promise was fulfilled. And thus Dr. Selwyn 
had the unique experience of attracting himself to 
his colleague and successor before he himself had 
left his native land for those romantic scenes amidst 
which his subsequent years were spent. 


II 
But perhaps I ought to have begun at the begin- 
ning. For, notable as was that service at the Wind- 
sor Parish Church, it merely pointed out to the 
Eton schoolboy the particular sphere in which he 
could best use his cultured mind and conspicuous 


132 A Faggot of Torches 


gifts. Long before that, under the beautiful influ- 
ences of his father and his mother, his heart had 
been captivated by the sweetness of the gospel story, 
and he had longed to devote his life to the proclama- 
tion of the Saviour’s love. ‘I should dearly like to 
be a clergyman,’ he used to tell his mother, ‘because 
I think that the saying of the Absolution must make 
people very happy!’ On his fifth birthday, since he 
had made marked progress in learning to read, his 
father presented him with a Bible. ‘Oh, my dear, 
dear Father,’ he writes from New Zealand, twenty- 
seven years later, a few hours after his public con- 
secration as Bishop of Melanesia, “God will bless 
you for all your love to me, and for your love to 
Him in giving me to His service. The Bible used 
to-day at the crowded and solemn consecration was 
the Bible that you gave me on my fifth birthday.’ 
He began to read as soon as he received it, and one 
passage—always a favourite with him—profoundly 
moved him even then. ‘If ever I become a preacher,’ 
he used to say, ‘I shall preach on the fifty-third of 
Isaiah!’ 

Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried our 
sorrows: yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of 
God, and afflicted. 

But He was wounded for our transgressions, He 
was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of 
our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we 
are healed. 

All we like sheep have gone astray; we have 


John Coleridge Patteson’s Text 133 


turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath 
laid on Him the iniquity of us all. 

That was his faith. It was a faith that was so ro- 
bust that all, the schoolboys at Eton admired his 
courage, feared his frown, and cherished a pro- 
found respect for his convictions. And that was 
his message. It was the keynote of his entire min- 
istry. The passage that charmed his heart as a 
child he afterwards translated into many tongues 
and repeated to many peoples. It was his solace to 
the very end. In the story of that last tragic voy- 
age, I catch a glimpse of him, sitting in his cabin, 
his Hebrew Bible and Delitzsch’s commentary spread 
out before him, scrutinizing once more the words in 
which he had found such deathless treasure. The 
thought embedded in those priceless sentences was 
the thought that was always uppermost in his mind. 

All we like sheep have gone astray; we have 
turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath 
laid on Him the iniquity of us all. 

The verse begins and ends with all, and thus com- 
pletes its circuit. John Coleridge Patteson felt the 
intense significance of those two all’s. All men— 
ancient and modern, savage and scholarly, black and 
white—have gone astray: therein they are all alike. 
They have turned every one to his own way: therein 
they differ. How could he point them all, all, all to 
Him on whom the separate and distinctive iniquities 
of them all had been laid? That, from the days of 
his happy childhood to the day of his sudden mar- 


134 A Faggot of Torches 


tyrdom, was the master-passion of his life. The 
two all’s of the fifty-third of Isaiah sank into his 
soul. In the light of those all’s, all men were alike 
to him. ‘It did not matter whether it was a black 
man or a white one who came to him,’ said one of 
his native converts after his death, ‘he loved them 
all alike.’ Nobody can thoroughly understand and 
appreciate John Coleridge Patteson unless he has 
learned to understand and appreciate the golden 
passage which he made his watchword. In a re- 
markable way, the fifty-third of Isaiah expresses 
the spirit of his life. Let me give a single illustra- 
tion. 
III 

It was his gentleness that made him great. He 
disarmed the wildest men by trusting them. His 
schooner drops anchor off some coral reef in the 
Pacific. The shore is crowded with excited natives 
brandishing their spears. They have never seen a 
white man before and do not know what to make of 
the strange apparition. Mr. Patteson plunges into 
the sea, strikes out for the reef, and stands, smiling 
and defenceless, among them. Or, the ship having 
been brought to anchor in a lagoon, the astonished 
natives surround it in their canoes. Mr. Patteson 
at once clambers down into one of the canoes and 
places himself at their mercy. In the course of one 
voyage he landed over seventy times amidst crowds 
of natives, naked and armed; yet never once was a 
hand raised against him. 


John Coleridge Patteson’s Text 135 


‘Savages!’ he used to say, ‘there are no savages! 
Approach them in the right way, treat them with 
confidence, assume the existence in them of ordi- 
nary human instincts, and you'll find nothing savage 
about them! Why, the fellows on the reef, who 
have never seen a white man, will wade back to the 
boat and catch one’s arm to prevent one falling into 
pits among the coral, just like an old nurse looking 
after her child! 

Some people would have charged those untutored 
blacks with ferocity. Mr. Patteson knew better ; 
and it was his text that taught him better. All we 
like sheep have gone astray. It is the most charit- 
able construction that can possibly be put upon hu- 
man wrongdoing. It is a crepuscular anticipation 
of that great cry from the Cross: Father, forgive 
them, for they know not what they do! The fifty- 
third of Isaiah does not attribute to man the fero- 
city of the tiger, nor the venom of the serpent, nor 
the cunning of the fox, but the stupidity of the 
sheep. ‘Mr. R. Rowley, of Shrewsbury, told me,’ 
says Richard Baxter, in his Call to the Unconverted, 
‘that he saw a strange sight on one of the bridges 
over the Severn. A man was driving a flock of fat 
lambs, and, something meeting and startling them, 
one of the lambs jumped upon the wall of the 
bridge, slipped, and fell into the stream. The rest, 
seeing him, followed; and all, or almost all, were 
drowned.’ 

All we like sheep have gone astray, says Isaiah. 


136 A Faggot of Torches 


They know not what they do, says the Saviour. 

Bishop Patteson would never accuse the islanders 
of anything worse than that. ‘“Savages!’ he ex- 
claimed contemptuously; ‘I’d like to see anyone call 
my Bauro boys savages!’ Like the prophet, and like 
the Saviour, he felt that he was dealing, not with 
wolves, but with sheep. They had gone astray, that 
was all. 

IV 

But even sheep do not model their wanderings on 
a fixed and regular pattern. There is initiative and 
individuality in their waywardness. We have turned 
each one to his own way. The ancients transgressed 
in one way; the moderns offend in another. Civil- 
ization has its polished sins; barbarism has its crude 
ones. The white man and the black man have 
turned each to his own way; and Jehovah hath laid 
upon a common Saviour the iniquities of them ail. 
That being so, Bishop Patteson felt that the black 
man ought to know of it, as well as the white. The 
white man had a multitude of teachers; but who 
had ever visited: the cannibal islands of the South 
Seas to tell the tribesmen the story of the Cross? 

It was my own privilege the other day to address 
a large gathering of ministers. When I resumed 
my seat, the chairman suggested that, instead of 
passing a formal vote of thanks to me, those present 
should endeavour to interest me in return. He in- 
vited any man who had ever enjoyed any particu- 
larly striking experience to relate it for my benefit. 


John Coleridge Patteson’s Text 137 


A highly-esteemed minister, the Rev. C. Torring- 
ton, rose and told of the pitiable distress that en- 
folded him when first he realized his need of salva- 
tion. ‘For three months,’ he said, ‘I walked in 
darkness. Then, one day, as I strolled along a 
country lane, I casually and thoughtlessly stooped 
to pick up a torn piece of newspaper that was blow- 
ing hither and thither. I glanced at it and read: 
He was wounded for our transgressions; He was 
bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our 
peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are 
healed. The familiar passage came to me that day 
radiant with new light, and I entered into rest. The 
words were like a diamond flash.’ 

Wounded for our transgressions—the white man 
had always said it. But why should not the black 
man say it too? 

With His stripes we are healed—why should not 
the islanders be helped to make that glad confes- 
sion? 

For fifteen years Bishop Patteson sailed from is- 
land to island about those sunlit seas. His sys- 
tem was simplicity itself. Having won the con- 
fidence of the people, he induced them to confide to 
his care one or two of the most intelligent young 
people on the island. These he carried away to his 
colleges at Auckland or Norfolk Island; and then, 
having evangelized and educated them, he restored 
them to their island homes to evangelize their own 
people. 


138 A Faggot of Torches 


Vv 


The fifty-third of Isaiah is a song of sacrifice. 
He was wounded. . He was bruised. . He 
ts brought as a ee to the slaughter. In the spirit 
of that sacrificial chapter, John Coleridge Patteson 
lived and laboured; in the spirit of that sacrificial 
chapter he laid down his life at the last. He was 
only forty-four. But by this time the slave-trader 
was at work in the South Seas. One unscrupulous 
trafficker, admiring the ingenuity of Bishop Patte- 
son’s methods, determined to turn them to his own 
account. He made his ship look as much like the 
Bishop’s schooner as possible, and sailed for Nu- 
kapu, an island lying between the New Hebrides 
and the Solomon Islands. He went ashore in a 
white robe, to impersonate the Bishop, and, after 
some blasphemous buffoonery, invited five of the 
islanders on board. In all innocence, they followed 
him. They were shown down into the hold, where 
some of the crew were making a pretence of conduct- 
ing church service. The islanders, not suspecting a 
trap, were lured below. The hatches were promptly 
put on and battened down, and the ship sailed away 
with her victims. When the natives ashore realized 
what had happened, they swore that they would 
have blood for blood. They would wreak their 
vengeance on the Bishop when he again appeared. 
They did. 

A few days later, on September 20, 1871, the 


John Coleridge Patteson’s Text 139 


Bishop himself reached Nukapu. It is but a palm- 
covered fleck of sand—blue waves breaking over 
coral reefs. Four canoes came off from the shore. 
Those on the ship fancied that they noticed some- 
thing sullen and menacing about the attitude of the 
natives; but the Bishop, who never showed suspi- 
cion, sprang into one of the canoes as usual. Away 
they went, and the crew of the vessel anxiously 
awaited the Bishop’s return. Later on, two canoes 
pushed off from the shore. A couple of women oc- 
cupied one of them; the other appeared to be empty. 
When near the ship, the women pushed the empty 
canoe towards it and then paddled back to the shore. 
It was not empty. In the bottom of it lay something 
covered with a native mat. Reverent hands lifted 
the mat, and there, beneath it, was the body of the 
Bishop! It bore five dreadful wounds; and on the 
breast was a palm branch in which five knots had 
been tied. On the face was the old familiar smile, 
sweet, brave, and calm as ever. The five wounds 
and the five knots were intended to represent the 
five men whom he was supposed to have stolen. 

He was wounded—says the fifty-third of Isaiah. 

He was bruised—that favourite passage of his 
goes on to say. 

‘His life was here taken by men for whose sake 
he would willingly have given it—says the monu- 
ment that now marks the spot where he was mur- 
dered. 

Like his Lord, he had died at the hands of those 


140 A Faggot of Torches 


whom he sought to save! He had laid down his 
life for those who took it! He had entered into the 
fellowship of his Lord’s sufferings! Put to death as 
a malefactor! Five bleeding wounds! Branches of 
palm trees! The last rites rendered by women who 
trusted him still! The very name of the group of 
islands was Santa Cruz—the Holy Cross! In a 
very singular and striking way, John Coleridge 
Patteson was identified in his death with Him who 
was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for 
our iniquities; and his lifelong affection for the 
fifty-third of Isaiah suggests that he himself would 
have coveted no death more sublime. 


XII 
ENOCH STAPLETON’S TEXT 


I 
Tue gently undulating Sussex downs—their green 
slopes flecked by white sheep and their golden corn- 
fields splashed by scarlet poppies—seemed farther 
than the farthest star to poor Hannah Stapleton as 
she sat watching her young husband building, in the 
depths of the great Virginian woods, the log cabin 
that was to be their first real home. Before her, an 
extensive clearing stretched away to the blue foot- 
hills whilst behind her and around her was the vir- 
gin forest. She shuddered whenever she glanced at 
it. Leaving the dear old English home—the home 
of her childhood—the ocean had seemed terrible 
enough; but, in comparison with the forest, the 
ocean was nothing. As, day after day, the immi- 
grants—twenty-three in number—had tramped be- 
hind their guides through these gloomy woods, the 
loneliness and the magnitude of it all had sent a 
chill to her very heart. The vastness and the 
strangeness of the forest seemed to crush her spirit. 
She saw the maple and the walnut, the hickory and 
the basswood mingling with the gorgeous tints of 
the rhododendron and the flaming hues of the azalea, 
Coppices and brilliant shrubs sprang up around the 
giant trees, whilst the loftiest branches above her 
: 141 


142 A Faggot of Torches 


were matted into one dense tangle by the wanton 
grape-vine whose coils swayed in the breeze like the 
loose shrouds of the ship she had so lately left. The 
mountains, too; would she ever forget that long 
climb over the Alleghanies with their abrupt preci- 
pices, their steep declivities, and their thickly- 
wooded slopes? All through the journey, wild, 
furry things of which she had only read in picture- 
books, startled her as they swung from bough to 
bough, prowled about in the distance, or scurried 
swiftly across the path. The deer, of which she 
caught fitful glances, reminded her of home, but 
she wished that, instead of the mocking-bird, the 
whip-poor-will and the night-hawk, she could hear 
once more the thrush, the blackbird, and the night- 
ingale. Every few days, in the course of that inter- 
minable pilgrimage, they came upon some quaint 
little settlement. There was a court-house, a roomy 
and odorous store, a cluster of cabins, a meeting- 
house, and, sometimes, an inn. Outside one court- 
house, Hannah saw a pillory, a whipping-post, and 
the stocks. Knots of men lounged about—laughing, 
talking, effecting exchanges, and driving bargains. 
These were dealers, trappers, Quakers, negroes, 
officers, slave-dealers and, now and then, a group of 
Indians. Hannah felt an instinctive dread of the 
red men and listened with horror to the stories of 
the ravages that they had recently wrought. 

But all things come to an end; Enoch and Han- 
nah reached their destination at last. To Hannah’s 


Enoch Stapleton’s Text 143 


delight she found that none of the new arrivals 
were to be very far from each other. She had 
formed some fast friendships on the ship and in the 
woods; it would seem like a link with the old land 
to meet her fellow travellers from time to time. 
Dotted among the newcomers were several homes 
established by earlier settlers; the depredations of 
the Indians made it imperative that settlements 
should be as close as possible. The place was called 
Newhampstead; it was not very far from the 
_ waters of the Ohio; and was, therefore, one of the 
most westerly outposts of the new civilization. 

And now, on this sunny morning, whilst Enoch 
proceeds with the erection of their home, Hannah 
leaves her own work for a few moments and comes 
out to watch him. A book rests on her knee. Enoch, 
who has been toiling since daylight, lays down his 
saw and comes across to her. He recognizes the 
book as the Bible that his father and mother had 
given him the night before they sailed. As he stands 
near her, she opens the volume casually, almost ab- 
sent-mindedly. It falls open at a place in which a 
book-mark rests; and, on the left-hand page, a text 
is underlined and marked with a cross. The words 
are these: Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and 
lean not unto thine own understanding: in all thy 
ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy 
paths. | 

‘Who marked it?? Hannah enquires. He takes a 
seat on the rough timber beside her. 


144 A Faggot of Torches 


‘T marked it, little woman,’ he says. ‘I took that 
for my text nearly a year ago, and, the very next 
day, I received the letter from Uncle Reuben offer- 
ing me a passage to America on the Queen o’ the 
West. Somehow, I felt then, and I feel now, that 
the text had something to do with it. I made up my 
mind that Sunday night to trust in the Lord with 
all my heart, and it seemed to me, when the letter 
came, that He was directing my path. That's why 
I marked the text in the new Bible as soon as father 
gave it to me. And that’s why I feel so sure that 
it will be all right with us; you needn’t worry, old 
lady: we'll just help each other to trust with all our 
hearts, and you'll find that we shall be well looked 
after.’ . 

It seemed easy, Hannah thought, for Enoch to 
talk like that. He was always so strong and so sure 
and so untroubled. But, somehow, her heart was in 
a constant flutter. The loneliness of the new life 
was so terrible, and its perils so constant, and Eng- 
land seemed such an eternity away, that she found it 
impossible to be as placid, as calm and as hopeful 
as Enoch. But she noticed that when, before retir- 
ing at night, they read together a few verses from 
the new Bible, the third chapter of Proverbs—the 
. chapter with the marked passage—was chosen more 
frequently than any other; and she found a growing 
pleasure in hearing Enoch read, in his deep, grave 
accents, the verses in which his soul delighted. 
Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not 


Enoch Stapleton’s Text 14s 


unto thine own understanding: in all thy ways ack- 
nowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths. Enoch 
seemed to rest with unwavering confidence on the 
dependability of that promise. It was a secret sat- 
isfaction to her that, whilst her own heart was pal- 
pitating with a constant dread, Enoch’s soul was 
so serene. Then, little by little, she found herself 
infected by his tranquillity; she, too, became less 
timid and more trustful; faith took the place of 
fear; and she surprised herself by singing in odd 
moments the hymns that she had sung so lightly as 
a girl. She learned from Enoch to trust in the Lord 
with all her heart, and she slowly came to feel that, 
with perfect wisdom and perfect love, He would 
direct their path in this strange wilderness. 


II 

Hannah’s case is by no means an isolated one. 
Enoch Stapleton’s text has often been the instru- 
ment by which one man’s soul has been infected by 
another man’s faith. Enoch Stapleton’s text was 
General Gordon’s text. He quoted it constantly as 
the source of all his strength and confidence. He 
had it framed and hung in his room in such a posi- 
tion that the words would greet him as soon as he 
opened his eyes every morning. In his early jour- 
nalistic days, Mr. W. T. Stead visited Gordon at 
Rockstone Place, Southampton, and was deeply im- 
pressed by the text upon the wall. “Before I entered 
my ’teens,’ Mr. Stead says, ‘those words were em- 


146 A Faggot of Torches 


bedded upon my memory,’ but the testimony of 
General Gordon to their efficacy and value power- 
fully affected him. He enthroned them in his heart 
with new and regal authority. ‘I have them now,’ 
he said, towards the close of his life. “I have them 
now, worked into the panels of my office sanctum 
in Mowbray House. Probably these verses are 
largely answerable for my lack of confidence in my 
capacity to steer my own course: Trust in the Lord 
with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own 
understanding: in all thy ways acknowledge Him, 
and He shall direct thy paths. In the atmosphere 
of the verses I have spent my life, so far as it is 
spent; and the system upon which I hope to spend 
the years that remain will be dominated by its influ- 
ence. In that faith I have lived; in that faith I ex- 
pect to die.’ 

And thus, through the agency of the text, an emi- 
nent journalist was infected by the faith of a dis- 
tinguished soldier, just as, a hundred years earlier, 
Hannah Stapleton had been infected by the faith of 
her husband. 


Til 


For it was in 1746 that Enoch and Hannah 
Stapleton built their home on the edge of the woods 
not far from the Ohio border. For ten years all 
went well with them; they prospered abundantly ; 
the farm was a veritable garden in the wilderness; 
and, to their unbounded delight, four little children 


Enoch Stapleton’s Text 147 


came to share and multiply their happiness. The 
letters that Hannah wrote to the old home in the 
Sussex lane are expressive of a deep and joyous 
content. In one of them she refers to the text. ‘It’s 
wonderful how it has all worked out,’ she says. 
“You can see things more clearly as you look back. 
We trusted in the Lord unth all our hearts, and 
there is no doubt that He has directed our steps. We 
often talk about the verses that Enoch marked in 
his Bible before he left home.’ This letter is dated 
February 16, 1756; and, by that time, although 
Hannah did not realize their portentous significance, 
clouds were beginning to gather. 

It was in May, 1756, that war between England 
and France was actually declared—the war that, 
culminating three years later in Wolfe’s dramatic 
victory at Quebec, led to the transfer of Canada to 
the British. But, for some time, all the elements 
that made for discord had been smouldering. Eng- 
lish and French had. done everything in their power 
to poison the minds of the Indians against each 
other. Several times, reports had reached New- 
hampstead of Indian raids on settlements at no 
great distance; farms had been set on fire; forts and 
court-houses had been destroyed; the scalping-knife 
had done its dreadful work. In common with all 
the settlers at Newhampstead, Enoch had made 
every preparation to defend his home in the event 
of an attack. At times, Hannah’s heart was filled 
with foreboding as she heard of the havoc wrought 


148 A Faggot of Torches 


so near at hand and as she watched the precautions 
that Enoch was taking to guard against the Indians. 
In many of the villages, even the houses of worship 
were transformed into watch-towers, and, from the 
turrets by which they were surrounded, a constant 
vigil was kept. 

‘The meeting-house,’ [so runs one record of the 
period] ‘was solid mayde to withstand ye wicked 
onslaughts of ye Red Skins. Its foundations was 
laide in ye feare of ye Lord, but its Walls was truly 
laide in ye feare of ye Indians, for many and grate 
was ye Terrors of em. Alle ye able-bodyed Men 
did work thereat, and ye olde and feeble did watch 
in towers to espie if any Savages was in hidinge 
neare, and every Man kept his Musket right to his 
hande.’ 

But, although Newhampstead was constantly — 
startled by tidings of dreadful happenings not far 
away, and although the little community was again 
and again dismayed and excited by false alarms, its 
peace and prosperity remained unbroken. It seemed 
to live a charmed life. And, whenever its immu- 
nity was mentioned, Hannah and Enoch glanced 
meaningly at each other. For, with the passage of 
the years, they had come to connect their safety 
with the promise of the text. They had trusted m 
the Lord with all their hearts and their path had 
been directed and protected. Hannah little dreamed 
that a time was coming when she would not be able 
to bear the mention of the words in her hearing. 


Enoch Stapleton’s Text 149 


IV 


With the conquest of Canada, the war came to an 
end. The victory of the British was so complete 
that all men—on both sides of the Atlantic—hoped 
for a stable and enduring peace. During the war, 
white men had fought against white men; Indians 
instigated by white men on either side, had merci- 
lessly attacked white men on the other side; and, 
stranger still, the red men, espousing opposite 
causes, had fought with characteristic ferocity 
against each other. But now the white men, who 
had caused all the trouble, had clasped hands; and 
it was hoped that the Indians would bury the hatchet 
at the same time. But an unexpected danger arose. 

The Indians were alarmed at the absolute author- 
ity that England now exercised in the land that, by 
every right, belonged to the red men. Tribes that 
had fought against each other during the war, 
called one another to conference. The Iroquois 
and the Miamis joined with the Shawnees and the 
Delawares in urging a united onslaught on the Eng- 
lish settlements. ‘We must destroy the English,’ 
cried Red Hawk, ‘or the English will destroy us! 
Let us drive them back beyond the Alleghanies! In 
Pontiac of the Ottawas, the powerful chief of the 
vast North-West, they found a leader who was as 
deep in counsel and astute in strategy as he was 
masterful in authority and fearless upon the war- 
path. Under his command, they formed a great 


150 A Faggot of Torches 


confederacy of insurgent nations to assert their own 
right to the forests of the West and to drive the 
white men out of the land. They organized a com- 
prehensive plan of campaign and lost no time in 
carrying it into execution. The sky became lurid 
with the glare of burning blockhouses. 

‘Nor,’ says the record, ‘was it the garrisoned 
stockades alone that encountered the fury of the 
savages. They roamed the wilderness, massacring 
all whom they met. They struck down the trader 
in the wood, scalping him on the instant and hor- 
ribly mutilating his body. They prowled round the 
cabins of the husbandmen on the frontier; their 
tomahawks struck alike the labourer in the field 
and the child in the cradle. Hannah heard one 
afternoon’ a piercing scream at the back of the 
house. Early that morning Enoch had taken Seth, 
their second-born, away to the woods. ‘I thought,’ 
cried Hannah, starting up in horror, ‘I thought that 
the children were with Mary in the front? They 
were. The scream at the back was merely a device 
to cover the confusion in the front and to focus at- 
tention upon the wrong quarter. Whilst Hannah was 
frantically searching the yard and outbuildings at 
the back, the red: men were vanishing in the opposite 
direction with Mary and the two little ones as pris- 
oners. ; 

It was during the dark and lonely months that 
followed—months that Hannah could never after- 
wards recall without a tear—that she refused to 


Enoch Stapleton’s Text Ht 


listen to the text. It had failed her! She had 
trusted in the Lord with all her heart and her home 
had. been left unto her desolate. Often she started 
up in the night crying ‘Mary!’ or ‘John!’ or ‘Ruth! 
Her poor husband did his best to soothe her distress 
and restore to her empty soul the boon of faith; but 
Hannah’s heart was breaking. 


Vv 


Meanwhile, the settlers felt that the position had 
become intolerable. No home was secure. They 
met in conference and resolved to form a great yeo- 
man army to sweep the forests, bring the Indians 
to their knees, and compel them, as far as possible, 
to restore their captives. Each State contributed 
its quota; even the peace-loving Quaker-bred Penn- 
sylvanians sent a thousand men. The strange ex- 
pedition set out. Mothers and sisters accompanied 
it in the fond hope of finding in the wigwams the 
children who had been ruthlessly torn from their 
arms. Hannah insisted upon being of the number. 
The campaign ended in scenes that Bancroft des- 
cribes as the loveliest that the American forests 
ever witnessed. Here is one! Beneath a bower 
erected on the green river-bank, the great chiefs and 
warriors of the Senecas, the Delawares and the 
Shawnees sue for peace. They lead in a long string 
of captives. Thousands of eager eyes scrutinize each 
face as it appears; there are a few cries of delight ; 
and, when the procession ends, there are many tears 


152 A Faggot of Torches 


of disappointment. But the chiefs throw down a 
huge bundle of sticks. Each stick represents, they 
explain, a captive whom they undertake to return 
within a day or two. They kept their word. ‘The 
arrival of the prisoners,’ says Bancroft, in the pas- 
sage to which I have just referred; ‘the arrival of 
the prisoners formed the loveliest scene ever enacted 
in the wilderness. Mothers recognized their lost 
babes; sisters and brothers scarcely able to recover 
the accents of their native tongue, discovered with 
surprise that they were children of the same parents.’ 
Nor did the joy end there. ‘For,’ says the historian, 
‘humanity abounds with strange affections. Whom 
the Indians spared, they loved! They had not taken 
the little ones into their wigwams without receiving 
them into their hearts. To part with them was 
anguish to the red men: they shed torrents of tears.’ 
They begged that, in the days to come, they might 
visit those who had become so dear to them. They 
came from day to day to the homes that they had 
once ravaged, bringing gifts of corn and skins. The 
red men and the white men became attached to each 
other by ties that they had never before known. 

It was during those days that Hannah wept over 
her own faithlessness. 

‘Enoch,’ she said one Sunday night, as, arm-in- 
arm, they walked back from the meeting-house that 
no longer needed towers and turrets to the home in 
which, with perfect composure, they could leave un- 
guarded the treasures that had been so wonderfully 


Enoch Stapleton’s Text 153 


restored to them, “Enoch, I see now that I never did 
as the text commands, and never, therefore, deserved 
the peace that it promises. It says, Trust in the Lord 
with all thine heart; you alone did that, Enoch. | 
never trusted with all my heart. I trusted a little, 
and enjoyed a little peace. But, Enoch,’ she added, 
leaning more heavily upon his arm, “it was you who 
taught me to trust a little: you must teach me now 
to trust with all my heart’ And although he smiled, 
pressed her hand between his elbow and his side, 
and said that he had nothing to teach her, she felt 
that in his comradeship they would slowly learn the 
lesson of the larger trust. 


XII 
RICHARD BAXTER’S TEXT 


I 


In the noble statue that has been erected to Richard 
Baxter at Kidderminster—the scene of his most 
splendid and enduring triumphs—the preacher’s up- 
raised hand is pointing to the skies. In that mute 
gesture there is a subtle touch of spiritual genius. 
For Richard Baxter is the most compelling and most 
victorious evangelist that England has ever pro- 
duced. ‘It is,’ as Dr. Alexander Grosart points out, 
‘no exaggeration to affirm that this one man drew 
more hearts to the great Broken Heart than any 
single Englishman of any age.’ The secret lies 
upon the surface. Baxter was tremendously and 
desperately in earnest; and such ardent souls carry 
at their girdle a golden key that unlocks all our 
hearts. To this day, nobody can turn the pages of 
his books, glance casually at his portrait, or even 
gaze upon his statue, without feeling the seraphic 
intensity of his passion. Across a chasm of three 
hundred years we catch the glow of his hot heart. 
We find it difficult to realize that we never actually 
saw the tall and slender frame with which we are so 
familiar—the tall and slender frame that always 


154 


Richard Baxter’s Text Ton 


seemed too frail a casket for the restless and fiery 
spirit that dominated it. Dr. Charles Stanford 
used to say that, whenever his eyes turned to the 
portrait of Richard Baxter, the face seemed to 
flicker into life, and he found himself overwhelmed 
by a singular tenderness, by an unwonted sensitive- 
ness and by all kinds of delicate emotions. We have 
each been conscious of some such sensations as we 
have looked into that grave and thoughtful face with 
its dark and pleading eyes. And the feeling has 
made it easier for us to appreciate the resistless ap- 
peal that Baxter must have made to those who, act- 
ually listening to his full, rich voice, and actually 
looking into those flashing, penetrating eyes, capitu- 
lated unconditionally to the charm of his smile, the 
gentleness of his humour, the cogency of his rea- 
soning,. and the force of his tense and virile person- 
ality. He was, says Dr. Grosart, the most earnest 
man in England. What made him so? That is the 
question. 
II 

And the answer to that question is that the fires 
of his fervour were lit by a vivid and profound ex- 
perience of the divine mercy. I catch three glimpses 
of him—they are only glimpses, for Baxter seldom 
speaks much about himself—but, though mere 
flashes, they reveal much. 

(1) He is a boy in his ’teens. He has been dan- 
gerously ill; and the illness has awakened in his alert 
mind a score of questions about other worlds. What 


156 A Faggot of Torches 


is God? Is there a future life? Is the soul immor- 
tal? Are the Scriptures true? The boy summons 
all the resources of his intellect to grapple with 
these majestic problems. ‘He feared the face of no 
speculative difficulty. Dark as were the shapes 
which crossed his path, they must be closely ques- 
tioned; and, gloomy as was the abyss to which they 
led, it was to be unhesitatingly explored.” He had 
no friends to help him; his parents were unsympa- 
thetic; his pastors and teachers were dissolute and 
unenlightened; his only hope was in books. A 
Bible lay on his father’s table; and that Bible, as 
Sir James Stephen says, would have been ill-ex- 
changed for all the treasures of the Vatican. In ad- 
dition, he managed to scrape together a few other 
literary curiosities—three particularly. The first 
was a torn and battered volume that somebody had 
lent to his father. The unalluring tome was the 
work of a Jesuit named Parsons, though adapted 
and edited by Bunny, a Puritan. The second was 
The Bruised Reed, by Richard Sibbes. The third 
was Perkins’ On Repentance. 

Woodrow, the ecclesiastical historian, tells of an 
English merchant who visited Scotland, and, on his 
return to London, was asked the news. 

“News?” he replied, ‘great news! I went to St. 
Andrews, where I heard a sweet, majestic-looking 
man, Blair by name, who showed me the Majesty 
of God. After him I heard a little fair man, Ruth- 
erford by name, who showed me the Loveliness of 


Richard Baxter’s Text 157 


God. Then I went to Irvine, where I heard a well- 
favoured, proper old man, Dixon by name, who 
showed me all my heart! 

Bunny, Sibbes and Perkins did for Baxter ex- 
actly what Blair, Rutherford and Dixon did for 
Woodrow’s merchant. Bunny showed him the 
Majesty of God; Sibbes showed him the Loveliness 
of Christ; and Perkins showed him all his heart. 
Now see him! A tall, bony youth of fifteen, he 
strolls with bowed head and folded arms among the 
wild flowers in the leafy lanes; in an agony of sup- 
plication he kneels, until long past midnight, beside 
the bed that promises his tortured spirit so little re- 
pose; and, on Sundays, he bows amidst the cold 
formalities of the services at his father’s church, 
hoping against hope that he will hear some word to 
comfort him. And in the fields, in the home and in 
the sanctuary, he lifts to heaven unceasingly the cry 
of the publican in the temple: God be merciful to 
me, a sinner! God be merciful to me, a sinner! 
This is our first glimpse of him; now for the second! 

(2) He is in the full swing of his rich and won- 
derful ministry. Scrupulously conscientious, he 
closely examines the motives and the methods that 
mark his ministerial life. The searching review 
fills him with shame, and he commits to paper a 
careful analysis of the blemishes of heart and tongue 
by which his public life has been disfigured. It is 
an amazing document. ‘Many years ago,’ said 
Dean Stanley, in unveiling the beautiful statue at 


158 A Faggot of Torches 


Kidderminster, ‘many years ago, on one of the few 
occasions when I had the pleasure of meeting the 
late Sir James Stephen, he recommended me, with 
his own peculiar solemnity, to read the last twenty- 
four pages of the first part of Baxter’s Narrative 
of his Own Life. “Lose not-a day in reading it,” 
he said; “you will never repent it.” That very 
night I followed his advice, and I have ever since 
publicly and privately advised every theological stu- 
dent to do the same.’ Baxter’s classic confession 
closes with these words: ‘I mention all these dis- 
tempers in order that my faults may be a warning 
to others. As for myself, they call on me for re- 
pentance and watchfulness. Because of the merits 
and sacrifice and intercession of Christ, God be 
merciful to me, a simner, and forgive my known and 
unknown sins!’ This is our second glimpse of him. 
There is yet one more. 

(3) He is on his death bed. ‘Never,’ says Dr. 
Orme, his biographer, ‘never was contrite sinner 
more humble, never was a sincere penitent more 
calm and comfortable. He acknowledged himself 
to be the vilest worm that ever went to heaven. 
Many times he prayed, God be merciful to me, a sin- 
ner! and blessed God that this was left upon record 
in the gospel as an effectual prayer. All! his hopes, 
he said, were based on the free mercy of God in 
Christ. Once, after a short slumber, he awoke and 
said: I shall rest from my labours. A minister who 
was present finished the quotation: and your works 


Richard Baxter’s Text 159 


will follow you. ‘No,’ he replied from the bed, ‘no 
works; I will leave out works!’ When a friend was 
comforting him with the remembrance of the good 
that he had done by his voluminous writings, he 
exclaimed : “The good that J have done! I was but 
a pen in God’s hand; and what praise is due to a 
pen?’ 

God be merciful to me, a sinner! he moans, as, 
laying aside his torn but treasured books, he goes 
out into the solitude of the Shropshire lanes. 

God be merciful to me, a sinner! he cries, as he 
brings to a close his critical review of his minis- 
terial life. 

God be merciful to me, a sinner! he prays, not 
once, but over and over and over again, as he lies 
on his death-bed at the last. 

God be merciful to me, a sinner! Luke has told 
us that it was the cry of the publican in the temple; 
Dr. Stoughton has told us that it was William Wil- 
berforce’s text; Ian Maclaren has told us that it 
was Dr. Maclure’s text; Charlotte Bronté has made 
it Lucy Snowe’s text; and, most certainly, it was 
Richard Baxter’s. 

III 

It was a profound recognition of the greatness 
of the divine mercy to him, a sinner, that drove him 
into the ministry. His father’s ambition was that 
he should become a courtier; and, at the age of 
eighteen, he set out for Whitehall with a letter of 
introduction to Sir Henry Herbert, the master of 


160 A Faggot of Torches 


the revels. A month at the court of Charles the 
First sufficed to fill him with disgust; and, at Christ- 
mas-time, he set out for home. That winter was a 
phenomenal one. England was Arctic; the roads 
were buried deep in frozen snow. Riding back to 
Shropshire, Baxter met a loaded wagon; and, to 
make room for it, spurred his horse up the bank. 
The horse slipped; the girths broke; and Baxter was 
thrown immediately under the wheel. When the 
wheel was all but touching him, the horses unac- 
countably stopped. His miraculous escape power- 
fully impressed his mind, and he felt that his life, 
so marvellously preserved, should be devoted to 
some high end. His thoughts swung back to the 
ministry. Soon after his arrival at the old home, 
his mother died; and the emotions awakened by her 
death deepened the impression. 

God be merciful to me, a sinner! he had cried; 
and his cry had been heard and answered in many 
wonderful ways. Ought he not to live to tell of that 
mercy to others? Ought he not to seek, above 
everything else, the eternal salvation of his fellow- 
men? ‘The dominant motive of his ministry,’ 
Dean Boyle declares, “was to be a preacher intent 
on saving the souls of men.’ The winning of a 
soul was to him what the winning of a race is to' an 
athlete; what the winning of a battle is to a soldier ; 
what the winning of a scholarship is to a student; 
what the winning of his bride is to a lover. He 
literally ached for souls. 


Richard Baxter’s Text 161 


IV 


The time would fail me to tell of his effective 
labours amidst the horrors of the plague of Lon- 
don; of his faithful and fearless ministries on the 
battlefields of the Civil War; of his colossal literary 
output, extending to nearly two hundred volumes; 
of his enthusiasm for the evangelization of the 
North American Indians; of the barbaric treatment 
to which he was subjected by the infamous Judge 
Jeffries; and of the languishing imprisonments and 
cruel persecutions which he so bravely and unflinch- 
ingly endured for conscience’ sake. He knew his 
own mind; he interpreted in uttermost simplicity 
the dictates of his own heart and conscience; he 
never tampered with his oracle and never sold the 
truth to serve the hour. In days when it was con- 
sidered correct to change one’s coat to meet the ex- 
igencies of fluctuating ideas and changing opinions, 
he stood as firm as a rock. He could not be bribed 
by the royal offer of a bishopric, nor browbeaten by 
the social ostracism of the Five Mile Act. The 
promise of a pension could not coax him, and the 
prisons of Clerkenwell could not cow him into ser- 
vile submission. Even when every limb was en- 
feebled by disease and racked with pain, he courted 
dungeons and scaffolds rather than shock the faith 
of his followers by retracting or amending a single 
sentence which he had written. No man of his 
time, with the possible exception of John Bunyan, 


162 A Faggot of Torches 


has exerted a more practical or permanent influence 
on the life of subsequent generations. 


V 

To see him at his best, however, he must be seen 
at Kidderminster. He was twenty-six when he 
commenced his beautiful and historic ministry in 
that town, and the fragrant record of his labours 
there will be treasured and studied by ministers as 
long as the language lasts. The story of Baxter’s 
nineteen years at Kidderminster is one of the choic- 
est idylls in the stately romance of the Church, In 
his preaching, as the younger Calamy put it, ‘he 
talked about another world like one who had been 
there and was come as an express from thence to 
make a report concerning it.’ Or, in the words of his 
own couplet—a couplet which seemed to De Quin- 
cey to be ‘absolutely sublime, equally for weight and 
for splendour like molten gold’—he 

. preached as never sure to preach again 
Ane as a dying man to dying men. 

During the week he exhausted all his energy and 
time—though never free from pain—in trying to 
save the souls of his people one by one. He gathered 
them in groups; he formed them into classes; he 
dealt with them family by family; he appealed— 
earnestly, pleadingly, yearningly—to each individ- 
ual alone. He felt concerning Kidderminster, as 
Rutherford felt concerning Anwoth, that every soul 
won doubled his own everlasting felicity. 


Richard Baxter’s Text 163 


My heaven will be two heavens, 
In Immanuel’s Land. 

He even infected his converts with his own con- 
suming passion. ‘For,’ he says, ‘they thirsted day 
and night after the salvation of their neighbours’ ; 
and thus the fire spread from heart to heart and 
hearth to hearth. As Dean Boyle observes, the 
Church possesses no picture of pastoral life so art- 
less and buoyant as this priceless, touching record. 

‘And now,’ says Baxter himself, ‘and now, to the 
praise of my gracious Master, let me acquaint you 
with something of my success. The Church became 
so full on the Lord’s Day that we had to build gal- 
leries to contain all the people. Our week-day meet- 
ings also were always full. On the Lord’s Day all 
disorder became quite banished out of the town. As 
you passed along the streets on a Sabbath morning 
you might hear a hundred households singing psalms 
at their family worship. In a word, when I came 
to Kidderminster there was about one family in a 
whole street that worshipped God and called upon 
His name, and when I left there were some streets 
where there was not one family who did not do so. 
And, although we had six hundred communicants, 
there were not twelve of whom I had not perfect 
confidence in their salvation.’ 


vI 


All this is but the exemplification of a stupen- 
dous principle—the principle on which Baxter’s 


164 A Faggot of Torches 


heroic life was based. He held that everything that 
flowed into his life should, in still greater volume, 
flow out of it again. The living water should be in 
him, a spring of water, welling up into everlasting 
life. He never, for example, forgot those three 
books—the books that: showed him the Majesty of 
God, the Loveliness of Christ, and his own heart. 
‘The use that God made of books, above mimsters, 
to the benefit of my soul, made me,’ he says, ‘some- 
what excessively in love with good books.’ As long 
as he lived, therefore, he distributed books in the 
homes that he visited, and wrote as many books as 
he could. His Saints’ Everlasting Rest, his Call to 
the Unconverted, and his Reformed Pastor, are the 
heritage of all the ages and have been translated 
into a score of languages. ‘Which,’ asked Boswell, 
‘which of Baxter’s books should a man read? 
‘Read any of them,’ replied Dr. Johnson, “they are 
all good!’ , 

God be merciful to me, a sinner! he cried. And, 
in reply, the mercy of the Most High, rich and full 
and free, was abundantly ministered to him. From 
that hour he felt that he must lose no opportunity of 
leading others to that overflowing fountain of mercy 
and grace. It was his lifelong task, and even death 
could not interrupt it. ‘His tall, commanding fig- 
ure, said Dean Stanley, pointing to the statue at 
Kidderminster, ‘his tall, commanding figure, and his 
gaunt features are, by the art of the sculptor, still 
to be seen amongst us. His uplifted hand calls to 


Richard Baxter’s Text 165 


the unconverted of this century, as it called to the 
unconverted of the seventeenth century, to turn and 
hive.’ 

To turn and live! ‘I charge thee,’ cried Baxter, 
in 1657, ‘I charge thee to hear and obey the call of 
God, and turn that thou mayest live. But, if thou 
wilt not, I summon thee to answer it before the 
Lord, and I require thee there to bear me witness 
that I gave thee warning, and that thou wast not 
condemned for want of a call to turn and live, but 
because thou wouldst not believe it and obey it! 

To turn and live! That was precisely what the 
publican did in the temple when he smote upon his 
breast, cried God be merciful to me, a sinner, and 
went down to his house justified. Like that publi- 
can, on whose example he so loved to dwell, Baxter 
himself had turned, and, like him, had entered into 
the power of an endless life. By his imperishable 
record, by his deathless influence on our history, by 
his myriads of spiritual descendants, and by monu- 
ments like that erected to his memory at Kidder- 
minster, Richard Baxter still lives and moves among 
us; and no man, even now, is doing more than he 
to call his fellow-men to repentance and to life ever- 
lasting. 


XIV 
TOKICHI ISHIV’S TEXT 


Tens 
THE spiritual pilgrimage of Tokichi Ishii 1s, Dr. 
Kelman declares, the strangest story in all the 
world. It is, he adds, one of our great religious 
classics. ‘There is in it something of the glamour 
of the Arabian Nights and something of the hellish 
nakedness of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Horror. 
There is also the most realistic vision I have ever 
seen of Jesus Christ finding one of the lost. You 
see, as you read, the matchless tenderness of His 
eyes and the almighty power of the gentlest hands 
that ever drew a lost soul out of misery into peace.’ 
The story was first told in the saloon of the Em- 
press of Russia. The cold winds swept across the 
sea, having a touch of the northern ice in them, and 
a group of passengers had gathered in a sheltered 
spot. They were relating to each other all kinds of 
experiences with which they had met. But, after a 
while, every narrative was overshadowed and 
driven into the oblivion of forgetfulness by the 
story that was told by Miss Caroline Macdonald, a 
quiet little Scottish lady. As soon as she had fin- 
ished her amazing recital, everybody felt that they 
166 


Tokichi Ishii’s Text 167 


had been listening to one of the world’s most thrill- 
ing and absorbing romances. It is, as Mr. Fujiya 
Suzuki, M.P., says, just such a story as Victor 
Hugo’s Les Misérables. Tokichi Ishii is Jean Val- 
jean over again, but Jean Valjean with a profound 
spiritual experience. Dr. Kelman, who was of the 
party on board the Empress of Russia, insisted that 
the story, which had already been published in Jap- 
anese, must be translated into Western tongues. 
And, as a consequence, here it is! It is worthy, as 
the publishers claim in their introductory note, to 
be cherished among the classical prison documents 
which are among the priceless treasures of the 
Christian Church. It is entitled A Gentleman in 
Prison; and he would be of cold blood and sluggish 
soul who could read it without deep emotion. Nor 
is its interest merely—or mainly—sentimental. 
‘The most striking aspect of the book for many 
readers will be its psychology.’ Dr. Kelman de- 
clares, ‘One can imagine the glee with which Profes- 
sor William James would have seized upon it and 
given it world-wide fame. The narrative discloses 
a true psychologist, full of curiosity about himself 
and bewildered by the masterless passions of his 
amazing soul.’ It has, too, a very high apologetic 
value. If I knew a man who had any doubt about 
the reality of religion, or about the existence of 
God, or about the eternal Deity of Jesus Christ, 1 
would rather hand him a copy of A Gentleman in 
Prison than any volume of argument or of divinity 


168 A Faggot of Torches 


that has ever been published. If A Gentleman in 
Prison did not scatter his scepticism, nothing would. 


II 


The book is dedicated To All in Every Land Who 
Have Never Had a Chance. Ishii certainly never 
had. He was born in heathenism; his father was 
an inveterate drunkard; ‘his mother was the daugh- 
ter of a Shinto priest. Up to the time of his death, 
he only knew two Christians; and he met them dur- 
ing the brief period of his last imprisonment, and 
after he himself had avowed his faith in Christ. At 
the age of thirteen he had to decide whether he 
would steal or starve. He resolved the problem in 
the way in which most of us, similarly situated, 
would have settled it. He stole. ‘This,’ he says, 
“was the beginning of my life of crime. As I look 
back now I realize keenly how easily a child is in- 
fluenced by bad friends and surroundings.’ Steal- 
ing quickly led to gambling; gambling led to more 
stealing; and stealing and gambling together soon 
plunged him into prison. In prison he consorted 
with hardened criminals who laid themselves out to 
make the boy as callous as themselves. “The fact of 
the matter is,’ says Ishii, and he underlines the 
words, ‘the fact of the matter is that @ prison is 
simply a school for learning crime. He was an apt 
pupil. During the years that followed, he commit- 
ted one atrocity after another in the most shame- 


Tokichi Ishii’s Text 169 


less and audacious fashion. He spent most of his 
time in gaol; and, immediately upon his release, he 
committed some new felony or murder which once 
more brought the police upon his trail. And, on 
the twenty-ninth of April, 1915, his career of crime 
reached a hideous climax. He murdered the geisha 
girl who waited upon him at a tea-house near Tokyo. 
This, the most dastardly and dreadful of all his mis- 
deeds, nevertheless had in it the germ that devel- 
oped into better things. 


III 


Ishii crept away from the tea-house without leav- 
ing any clue that could lead to the conviction of the 
culprit. But, some time afterwards, when he was 
imprisoned on a later charge, he overheard his fel- 
low-prisoners discussing the tea-house murder. A 
man named Komori, the lover of the girl, was, they 
said, being tried for the murder of the geisha. 
Within the grimy soul of Ishii a knight lay slumber- 
ing, and this startling news awoke him. ‘For a 
moment,’ Ishii says, ‘I could scarcely believe my 
ears. But upon enquiry I found that the men knew 
the facts, and that it was actually true that an inno- 
cent man—the lover of the dead girl—was on trial 
for her murder. I began to think. What must be 
the feeling and the suffering of this innocent 
Komori? What about his family and relatives? I 
shuddered to think of the agony that must have 
been theirs. I kept on thinking; and, at last, I de- 


170 A Faggot of Torches 


cided to confess my guilt and save the innocent 


Komori.’ 

It is this quality in Ishii that led Dr. Kelman to 
call the book A Gentleman in Prison. ‘At his ‘worst,’ 
the doctor says, ‘he retains the pride and honour of 
a gentleman; and, in the supreme test, insists on 
dying to save an innocent man. Cruel as a tiger, 
he yet responds, like a charming little child, to any 
kindness shown him. In the midst of a career of 
systematic and outrageous vice, he sometimes acts 
in a spirit which many of the elect might envy.’ 
During the days that followed his confession, Ishii 
laboured ceaselessly to establish Komori’s innocence 
by proving his own guilt. Never in all the calen- 
dars of crime did a man work so hard to prove his 
innocence as Ishii worked to collect evidence that 
would secure his own conviction. To strengthen 
his case, he made a clean breast of all his offences; 
and owned frankly that he was the murderer of 
several victims whose deaths had been shrouded in 
impenetrable mystery. 

The trial of Ishii for the murder of the geisha 
girl dragged on for days and months. It was one 
of the most baffling cases in the criminal records of 
Japan. At length Ishii was found Not Guilty. ‘I 
was greatly disheartened about this,’ he says, “for 
I knew that if I were acquitted the innocent Komori 
would suffer the penalty of the crime. I was so dis- 
tressed about it that I could not sleep.’ He in- 
structed his lawyer to leave no stone unturned in 


a ee — ee a ae — 


SS 


ee ae 


Tokichi Ishii’s Text 171 


getting justice done. In accordance with the pro- 
visions of Japanese law, he appealed against his 
acquittal ; the case was reheard in the Appeal Court ; 
and Ishii—to his delight—was sentenced to death. 


IV 

Like everybody else, Miss Macdonald, who lived 
in Tokyo, was profoundly interested in the strange 
case, and determined, if possible, to visit Ishii in 
prison. ‘Early in the morning of New Yeat’s Day,’ 
Ishii says, ‘a special meal was brought me instead of 
the ordinary prison fare; and I was told that two 
ladies—Miss Macdonald and Miss West—had sent 
it. Who could these persons be? I had never heard 
of them before. There was no reason why I should 
receive anything from people I did not know, and I 
told the official that I could not accept the gift.” The 
gaoler induced him, however, to reconsider his 
proud decision. ‘The food was sent to me during 
the first three days of the New Year. A few days 
later a New Testament was received from the same 
source; but I put it on the shelf and did not even 
look at it’ In the end, however, the monotony of 
his prison life proved too much for his pride. 

‘T took the New Testament down from the shelf,’ 
he says, ‘and, with no intention of seriously looking 
at it, I glanced at the beginning and then at the 
middie. I was casually turning over the pages when 
I came across a place that looked rather interest- 
ing” It was the passage that tells how Jesus set 


172 A Faggot of Torches 


His face like a flint to go to Jerusalem, although He 
knew that it was certain death to do so. The con- 
ception appealed to Ishii’s sense of daring, of gal- 
lantry, of adventure. He laid the book aside, but 
he resolved to dip into it again. When next he 
picked it up, it opened by chance at the story of the 
man who had a hundred sheep, and who, leaving 
the ninety and nine in the fold, went out into the 
mountains to search for that which was lost until 
he found it. Again Ishii was interested, though not 
quite as deeply as before. But he promised himself 
that he would give the little book a third trial. He 
did. 

“This time I read how Jesus was handed over to 
Pilate by His enemies, was tried unjustly and put 
to death by crucifixion. As I read this I began to 
think. Even I, hardened criminal that I was, 
thought it a shame that His enemies should have 
treated Him in that way. I went on, and my at- 
tention was next taken by these words: And Jesus 
said, Father, forgive them, for they know not what 
they do. I stopped. I was stabbed to the heart as 
if pierced by a five-inch nail. What did the verse 
reveal to me? Shall I call it the love of the heart 
of Christ? Shall I call it His compassion? I do 
not know what to call it. I only know that, with 
an unspeakably grateful heart, I believed. Through 
that simple sentence I was led into the whole of 
Christianity.’ 

On each of the following pages, Ishii harps upon 


Tokichi Ishii’s Text 173 


his text. Every time he repeats it, it seems more 
wonderful to him. ‘The last words that a man 
utters,’ he says, ‘come from the depths of his soul; 
he does not die with a lie upon his lips. Jesus’ last 
words were: Father, forgive them, for they know 
not what they do; and so I cannot but believe that 
they reveal His true heart.’ 

‘I wish to speak,’ he says again later, ‘of. the 
greatest favour of all—the power of Christ, which 
cannot be measured by any of our standards. I have 
been more than twenty years in prison since I was 
nineteen years of age, and during that time I have 
known what it meant to endure suffering. I have 
passed through all sorts of experiences and have 
often been urged to repent of my sins. In spite of 
this, however, I did not repent, but, on the contrary, 
became more and more hardened. And then, by 
the power of that one word of Christ’s, Father, for- 
give them, for they know not what they do, my un- 
speakably hardened heart was changed, and I re- 
pented of all my crimes. Such power is not in man.’ 


Vv 


What was it in that dying prayer that so affected 
Ishii? He was impressed by the possibilities of a 
cry from the Cross. And, indeed, those possibili- 
ties are appalling. Jesus was still the Son of God, 
and the hands that were nailed to the tree were the 
creators of both nails and tree. He could have 


174 A Faggot of Torches 


asked His Father and immediately have received 
more than twelve legions of angels. When they 
taunted Him on His inability to save himself, He 
could have left the Cross in an instant, and, with 
angelic bands for His. escort and heavenly music 
ringing in His ears, could have returned to His 
Father, leaving the world to its inevitable doom. 

Or, without forsaking the work which He had set 
Himself to do, He might have called down fire from 
heaven upon His murderers. He might have cried 
‘Father, destroy them! and withered them where 
they stood. 

Or, without in any way acting inconsistently 
with His divine nature, He might have cried ‘Father, 
judge them: vengeance is Thine; do Thou repay!’ 

But, no! Father, forgive them, he prays, for 
they know not what they do. Did he scan those 
murderous faces, listen to their oaths and jests, and 
wonder what plea He could justly urge in extenua- 
tion of their awful deed? There was only one 
thing to be said on their behalf, and He discovered 
and presented that one plea. So skilful and mas- 
terly an Advocate is He who ever liveth to intercede 
for us! Forgive them, for they know not what 


they do! The plea in that prayer broke the heart 


of Ishii. It went to his soul, he says, like a five- 
inch nail. 
VI 
The New Testament of Ishii’s contains a striking 
statement which, during his last imprisonment, he 





Tokichi Ishii’s Text 17s 


may have noticed and pondered. It is to the effect 
that he that is in Christ Jesus is a new creation. It 
is the only phrase that can possibly convey an im- 
pression of the transformation that overcame Ishii. 
He became literally and actually, a new creation in 
Christ Jesus. He was made all over again. And, 
from his point of view, it seemed as if the world 
about him had been made all over again. ‘It was 
only after I came to prison,’ he says, ‘that I came to 
believe that man really has a soul. I will tell you 
how I came to see this. In the prison yard chrysan- 
themums have been planted to please the eyes of the 
inmates. When the season comes, they bear beauti- 
ful flowers, but in the winter they are nipped by the 
frost, and wither. Our outer eye tells us that the 
flowers are dead, but this is not the real truth. 
When the season returns the buds sprout once more 
and the beautiful flowers bloom again. And so I 
cannot but believe that if God in His mercy does 
not allow even the flowers to die, there surely is a 
soul in man which He intends shall live for ever.’ 
Here was fresh vision vouchsafed to the eyes of this 
new creation; and, in keeping with it, there was a 
new and radiant joy in his heart. 

‘To-day,’ he writes, in that wonderful journal 
that he kept all through his last imprisonment, 
‘to-day I am sitting in my cell with no liberty to 
come and go, and yet I am far more contented than 
in the days of my freedom. In prison, with only 
poor coarse food to eat, I am more thankful than I 


176 A Faggot of Torches 


ever was out in the world when I could get what- 
ever food I wanted. In this narrow cell, nine feet 
by six, I am happier than if 1 were living in the 
largest house I ever saw. The joy of each day is 
very great. These things are all due to the grace 
and favour of Jesus.” The Governor of the prison, 
Mr. Shirosuke Arima, heard of Ishii’s extraordinary 
bearing, and decided to visit him. ‘One day,’ he 
tells us, ‘I went to see Ishii in his cell and found 
him sitting bolt upright and looking very serious. 
My first glance showed him to be a powerfully built 
fellow, with heavy bushy eyebrows and a large flat 
nose. I could not help thinking that, if his heart 
were as rough as his exterior, one would have every 
right to fear him. But his eyes told a different 
story. They shone with a quiet beautiful light; his 
cheeks were clear and healthy looking, and his spirit 
was brimming over with gentleness. My heart went 
out to him with a great tenderness.’ 

Miss Macdonald was Ishii’s last visitor. ‘We 
both knew,’ she says, ‘that it might be the last time. 
I read to him words that. were penned centuries 
ago; but as I stood there in a tiny cubby-hole, and 
talked to him across a passage-way and through a 
wire screen, it seemed impossible to believe that they 
were not written for the very conditions that we 
faced there in that Japanese prison-house. “I have 
finished all my writing,” Ishii told me, “and my work 
is done. I am just waiting now to lay down this 
body of sin and go to Him.” I looked at him and 


OU OO EEE 


Tokichi Ishii’s Text 177 


his eyes were glowing with joy.’ He had not long 
to wait. 

‘This morning,’ wrote the Buddhist chaplain, in 
sending Miss Macdonald Ishii’s journal and effects, 
‘this morning Tokichi Ishii was executed at Tokyo 
prison. He faced death rejoicing greatly in the 
grace of God and with steadiness and quietness of 
heart. His last request was that you be told of his 
going, and be thanked for your many kindnesses. 
He has left his books and his manuscripts to you, 
and you will receive them at the prison office. His 
last words, which are in the form of a poem, he 
asked me to send to you. They are as follows: 

My name is defiled, 
My body dies in prison, 
But my soul, purified, 
To-day returns to the City of God! 

‘Ishii seemed to see nothing but the glory of the 
heavenly world to which he was going. Among the 
officials who stood by and saw the clear colour of 
his face and the courage with which he bore him- 
self, there was no one but involuntarily paid him re- 
spect and honour.’ The Gentleman in Prison, re- 
leased from the cage of his early conditions, and 
released from the prison bars that hedged him in in 
later years, was gloriously free at last! 


XV 
GEORGE FOX’S TEXT 


I 


Ir was the loneliest-looking grave that I had ever 
seen, and I could scarcely believe my eyes when I 
read upon the modest little stone so tremendous and 
historic a name. Having a quarter of an hour to 
spare before the time of my next appointment, I was 
loitering idly in the neighbourhood of Bunhill 
Fields. Absent-mindedly I turned down Roscoe 
Street. As I made my way past the dingy ware- 
houses and unalluring stores of that grimy thor- 
oughfare, my eye was suddenly attracted by a little 
patch of green on my leit. Looking through the 
iron bars, I saw, a few yards back from the road- 
way, a tennis court; and still nearer to me, a solitary 
tombstone! And on that simple and obscure stone, 
I read to my astonishment the name of one who 
moved the world as the world had seldom or never 
been moved before! For George Fox was a shoe- 
maker who, with his hammer, beat the ages into 
shape. 
II 

‘Perhaps,’ says Carlyle, ‘perhaps the most remark- 
able incident in modern history is not the Diet of 
Worms, still less the Battle of Austerlitz, Waterloo, 

178 


George Fox’s Text 179 


Peterloo, or any other battle; but an incident passed 
carelessly over by most historians, and treated with 
some degree of ridicule by others, namely, George 
Fox’s making to himself a suit of leather.’ Men 
saw George Fox sitting among his tanned hides, his 
paste-horns, his rosin and his well-worn tools; but 
they did not realize that the little shoe-shop was the 
Temple of Immensity, holier than any Vatican or 
Loretto-shrine. Yet, great as was the shoe-shop, 
the greatest day in its history was the day on which 
he left it. ‘Why,’ he asks himself, ‘should I be im- 
prisoned here among my straps, my tatters and my 
tag-rags? What binds me to my bench? The need 
of money? For shame! Will ail the shoe-wages 
under the moon ferry me to “that far Land of 
Light’ for which I sigh? I will to the woods; the 
hollow of a tree will lodge me, wild berries feed me, 
and, for clothes, can I not stitch for myself a peren- 
nial suit of leather?’ And thus, like a navigator 
pushing out into unknown seas in search of un- 
known lands, George Fox left everything that was 
dear to him in order that he might search untram- 
melled for ‘that far Land of Light’ on which his 
heart was so steadily set. And, in Carlyle’s judge- 
ment, nothing grander ever happened. 


III 

George Fox’s leather breeches have captured the 
imagmation of mankind. Those leather breeches, as 
Macaulay says, were known all over the country; 


180 A Faggot of Torches 


and Fox has himself told us that the hypocrites and 
hirelings of England trembled when it was ru- 
moured that the Man in Leather Breeches was com- 
ing. Carlyle implies that the fate of nations hung 
upon the thread with which the young shoemaker 
sewed together those leather breeches; but we must 
make some allowance for the fact that, just at that 
moment, Carlyle was engaged upon a Philosophy 
of Clothes. In the same sentence in which George 
Fox mentions the leather suit, which was to be his 
new wardrobe, he mentions the hollow tree which 
was to be his new home. Carlyle, busy among the 
sheets of Sartor Resartus, could think of nothing 
but the leather suit; yet, in point of fact, the hollow 
tree is of infinitely greater historic interest. It was 
whilst hidden in the hollow of that tree that George 
Fox caught the first glimpse of ‘that far Land of. 
Light’ for which his spirit had ached so long. 

It was a dark age in which to be looking for a 
Land of Light. English standards and English 
manners were at their lowest ebb. Society was as 
corrupt as it could well be; music and art were de- 
based; the sports and pastimes of life were univers- 
ally squalid and usually obscene; even religion was 
formal, hypocritical and revolting. The clergy were 
largely ignorant and degraded. ‘They grovelled,’ 
Colquhuon says, ‘in habits of the coarsest sensuality. 
They were content to sail with the stream, and a 
dirty stream it was down which English society was 
floating.’ Into this dense and murky fog the young 


George Fox’s Text 181 


shoemaker groped his way in search of ‘that far 
Land of Light’ which, sleeping and waking, haunted 
his tortured fancy. 

In his pitiful distress, he made his way from vi- 
carage to vicarage, begging to be directed into the 
way of life and peace. One clergyman advised him, 
if he would escape from his melancholy, to drink 
beer and dance with the girls. Another urged him 
to smoke and sing. Poor George shook his head. 
‘Tobacco,’ he says, ruefully, ‘was a thing I could 
not love; and, as to singing, how could J sing? A 
clergyman made sport of him before the servants; 
a fourth bade him marry; a fifth flew into a violent 
passion because, on his way up the garden path, 
George had inadvertently set his foot upon a flower- 
bed. A sixth gave him some physic and urged him 
to go to a surgeon and be bled. He accordingly 
went and had his arms and forehead lanced in sev- 
eral places; but no blood would flow, ‘so dried 
up was my body with sorrow, griefs, and troubles, 
which were so great upon me that I could have 
wished that I had never been born.’ For two years 
he pursued this passionate quest, a blind man among 
blind guides; and then, just as he was beginning to 
despair of ever sighting ‘that far Land of Light, 
its shining shores broke abruptly on his delighted 
vision. 

IV 

Broken-hearted and bewildered as a result of his 

disconcerting experiences, George Fox gave up the 


182 A Faggot of Torches 


preachers and teachers in despair. He suddenly 
came to the conclusion that, like Columbus scouring 
the Atlantic in search of India, he was looking for 
‘that far Land of Light’ in the wrong direction. He 
had looked around; he resolved to look within and 
to look up. It flashed upon him that the Kingdom 
of God is not to be seen on a distant skyline through 
a mariner’s glasses. Had not Jesus himself said 
that the Kingdom of God is within you? Did not 
the insatiable thirst for light prove that, to some ex- 
tent at least, the light was already breaking upon 
him? Is there not grace in the desire for grace? 
‘Thou would’st not have sought Him,’ as Pascal 
used to say, “unless thou hadst already found — 
Him.” ‘The Lord opened to me by His in- 
visible power,’ Fox tells us in his Journal, ‘that 
every man is enlightened by the divine light of 
Christ.’ And so the young shoemaker set out to 
search afresh—in silence, and in solitude. ‘I fasted 
much,’ he says, ‘and walked abroad in lonely places, 
and often took my Bible and sat in hollow trees till 
night came on. And frequently, after dark, I 
walked mournfully about by myself, for I was a 
man of sorrows, in the time of the first workings 
of the Lord in me.’ 

Christ was not in the hollow tree; yet in the hol- 
low tree George Fox found Him. For the very 
presence of the young shoemaker in the hollow tree 
was a pledge of his determination to seek his Lord 
at any cost. He had discovered that the salvation 


George Fox’s Text 183 


of his soul must be a matter of first-hand personal 
intercourse between himself and his Saviour. He 
would knock at vicarage doors no more. ‘For I 
saw that there was none among them all that could 
speak to my condition, And when all my hopes in 
all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly 
to help me; then, oh, then I heard a voice which 
said: “There is One, even Christ Jesus, that can 
speak to thy condition.” When I heard that, my 
heart did leap for joy. For the Lord showed me 
why it was that none upon earth could help me. It 
was that I might give Him all the glory, and that 
Jesus Christ might have the pre-eminence, seeing 
that it is He, and He alone, Who enlightens.’ ‘This — 
paragraph,’ says Henry S. Newman, ‘contains 
within itself the key of Fox’s after-life and of the 
doctrines that he subsequently preached.’ That 
being so, let us examine it a little more closely! 


Vv 


‘T am the Light of the World; he that followeth 
Me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the 
Light of Life? 

‘The Light of Life? ‘The Light of Life? 

‘That far Land of Light? 

George Fox had searched, passionately and tire- 
lessly, for ‘that far Land of Light.’ 

He had discovered that “it is Christ, and Christ 
alone, Who enlightens! 


184 A Faggot of Torches 


And, all alone in his hollow tree, he had come 
face to face with Christ! 

That profound and mystical experience, as Ed- 
ward Grubb says, transformed his entire life and 
invested him with a mission. ‘From being a des- 
pairing seeker, he became, without any human help, 
a happy finder; and he was able to bring many 
others into the same experience. He concluded that 
the Light from God that had arisen in his own soul 
was available for every man who would turn to it 
and obey it: it was not the prerogative of a favoured 
few.’ 

That was the keynote of all that followed. His 
wife has told us how she heard him speak for the 
first time. It was in the church at Ulverston in 
Lancashire. When George Fox, then a youth of 
twenty-eight, entered the building, the congregation 
were singing the hymn before the sermon. ‘When 
they had finished singing, he stood up upon a seat 
and desired permission to speak, which was granted. 
He began to explain how that Christ was the Light 
of the World, and lighteth every man that cometh 
into the world, and that by this light the people 
might all come to God. I stood up in my pew and 
wondered at his doctrine; for I had never heard 
such before.’ 

‘In all his testimony and ministry,’ says William 
Penn, ‘George Fox laboured incessantly to open this 
one truth to the understanding of the people—that 
Christ Jesus 1s Himself the Light of the World’ 


George Fox’s Text 185 


His own experience of the dawning of that divine 
Light was so sensational that he felt that he would 
be recreant to the best impulses of human nature if 
he failed to communicate to all his fellow-men the 
revelation that he had himself received. He went 
everywhere, talking to everyone about the Light— 
the Light that shineth in darkness—Christ Jesus, 
the Light of the World. ‘His illumination,’ as one 
of his biographers has said, ‘altered everything for 
him; it was the Dayspring from on High; it 
warmed his heart, filled him with joy, and gave him 
a mission. He itinerated these islands, preaching 
and protesting as no man had ever done before. He 
wore out his clothes, his horse, his critics, his perse- 
cutors, and, eventually, himself. In strange places 
and at all times he bore his testimony to all classes 
of persons, from the Lord Protector to the kitchen- 
maid, and from the judge to the convicted thief. 
He was every man’s chaplain; he was a universal 
evangelist.’ ‘Nothing,’ says Bancroft, in his His- 
tory of the United States, ‘nothing could daunt his 
enthusiasm. As he rode about the country, the seed 
of God sparkled about him like innumerable sparks 
of fire. If cast into gaol among felons, or cruelly 
beaten, or set in the stocks, or ridiculed as mad, he 
still proclaimed the oracles of the Voice within him. 
If driven from the church, he spoke in the open air; 
forced from the shelter of the humble alehouse, he 
slept without fear under a haystack or watched 
among the furze. His frame in prayer is described 


186 A Faggot of Torches 


as the most awful, living, and reverent ever felt or 
seen. By night and by day, by sea and by land, he 
was always in his place, and always a match for 
every service and occasion.’ 


VI 

There, then, he is—the Man, with his Mission 
and his Message! As Mr. T. Edmund Harvey, 
M.P., has said, ‘we can picture him as he travelled, 
now on foot and now on horseback, clad in the 
leathern doublet and breeches, large of frame, with 
long straight locks (not close cropped in the 
Puritan fashion), and with those keen flashing eyes 
which more than once cowed and daunted oppo- 
nents, even when his life was in danger. Sparing in 
diet and unwearied by hardships, he went to and 
fro throughout the whole land, preaching sometimes 
in churches, sometimes in’ market-places, in open 
fields and on the hillside, or in the kitchens and 
halls of farms and country houses.’ He is a prophet; 
but he is a prophet who keeps his feet on solid 
ground. He is a mystic; but, of all mystics, he is 
the most severely practical. Professor William 
James declares that ‘the religion found by Fox is 
something which it is impossible to overpraise. In 
a day of shams it was a religion of veracity rooted 
in spiritual inwardness, and a return to something 
more like the original gospel than men had ever 
known in England.’ George Fox flashed the radi- 
ance that streamed into his own soul into every 


George Fox’s Text 187 


crack and cranny and crevice of human activity. 
‘He opposed injustice wherever he met it,’ says Dr. 
Rufus M. Jones. His enemies sneeringly dubbed 
him ‘the universal reformer’ because of the broad 
area of human experience that his witness pene- 
trated. And why not? For, if Christ is the Light 
of the World, He is the Light of everything and 
everybody in the world; and George Fox felt that, 
to every throb and heart-beat of human existence, 
that Light must be applied. 


VII 

Yes: and, if Christ is the Light of the World, He 
is the Light of all the world! ‘Let your light shine 
among the Indians!’ was George Fox’s dying mes- 
sage to the Quakers on the Delaware. ‘Let your 
light shine among the Blacks and Whites that ye 
may bring them to Christ! If Christ is the Light 
of the World, he argued, then every continent and 
island ought to be bathed in His splendour! 

‘That far Land of Light? 

‘Christ Jesus, the Light of the World! 

‘The Light of the World—the World! 

During his long, eventful, and adventurous 
career, George Fox had done all that ingenuity and 
enthusiasm could suggest to spread the Divine Light 
to every creature and to every shore. And, on his 
death-bed, he bequeathed the stupendous task as a 
sacred charge to his friends and followers. And, a 
few days later, a great concourse of Quakers gath- 


188 A Faggot of Torches 


ered round that open grave in Roscoe Street to pay 
an affectionate tribute to his influence and authority. 
The record is very touching. ‘Divers loving testimo- 
nies were given from a lively remembrance of the 
blessed ministry of this dear and ancient servant of 
the Lord; his early entering into the Lord’s work at 
the breaking forth of this Gospel day, his innocent 
life, long and great travels, and unwearied labours 
of love in the everlasting gospel; the manifold suf- 
ferings, afflictions, and opposition which he met and 
endured; and the turning and gathering of many 
thousands out of Darkness into the Light of Jesus 
Christ.’ 

Out of Darkness into Light! The words epito- 
mize the story of his own spiritual pilgrimage. 

Out of Darkness into Light!’ The words epito- 
mize the record of his public and world-wide min- 
istry. 

Out of Darkness into Light! In the hollow tree 
George Fox found Christ, the Light of the World— 
the Light that shineth in darkness—and, during the 
forty years that followed, he poured that flood of 
Living Light into the highways and byways of two 
continents. 


——————— 


ee 


XVI 
DOCTOR JOHNSON’S TEXT 


I 


Dr. SAMUEL JoHNSON is the classical example of 
an extremely religious man who derived very little 
comfort from his religion. The old doctor bestrides 
this narrow world like a colossus. Carlyle calls him 
the largest soul in all England—a giant, invincible 
soul. His is one of the most familiar figures in our 
history. Thanks mainly to Boswell’s vivid and pal- 
pitating pages, ‘the old philosopher is still among us 
in the rusty coat with the metal buttons and the 
shirt which ought to be at wash—blinking, puffing, 
rolling his head, drumming with his fingers, tearing 
his meat like a tiger, and swallowing his tea in 
oceans. No human being who has been so long in 
his grave is so well known to us.’ Thus Macaulay, 
who adds that we have but to open Boswell’s unique 
and immortal volume and, as if by magic, ‘the club- 
room is before us, with the table on which stand the 
omelet for Nugent and the lemons for Johnson. 
There are assembled those heads which live for 
ever on the canvas of Reynolds. There are the 
spectacles of Burke and the tall thin form of Lang- 
ton, the courtly sneer of Beauclerk and the beaming 
smile of Garrick, Gibbon tapping his snuff-box and 
189 


190 A Faggot of Torches 


Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear. And in the 
foreground is that strange figure which is as famil- 
jar to us as the figures of those among whom we 
have been brought up—the gigantic body; the huge 
massy face, seamed with the scars of disease; the 
brown coat; the black worsted stockings, the grey 
wig with the scorched foretop; the dirty hands, the 
nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see the eyes 
and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see 
the heavy form rolling; we hear it puffing; and then 
comes the “Why, sir!” and the “What then, sir?” 
and the “No, sir!” and the “Don’t you see your 
way through the question, sir?”’ Judge him as 
you may, he is a great character, and as good as he 
is great. “Few men on record,’ says Carlyle, ‘have 
had a more merciful, tenderly affectionate nature 
than old Samuel: within that shaggy exterior of 
his there beat a heart warm as a mother’s, soft as 
a little child’s.”, And Sir Leslie Stephen avers that 
of all the heroes, statesmen, philanthropists, and 
poets who sleep in Westminster Abbey, there are 
few whom, when all has been said, we can love so 
heartily as Samuel Johnson. Like all sensible men 
the doctor dearly loved to be honestly praised; but 
he would have desired no tribute more eloquent than 
that. 
II 

Now, beyond the shadow of a doubt, Doctor 
Johnson was an intensely religious man. Indeed, 
it is no exaggeration to say that his religion was the 


a 


Doctor Johnson’s Text 191 


biggest thing about him. His face always clouded 
when he recalled the fact that there was a time 
when he paid no heed to such things. ‘I was,’ he 
once told Boswell, ‘for some years totally regardless 
of religion. It had dropped out of my mind. This 
was at an early part of my life. Sickness brought 
it back, and I hope I have never lost it since.” This 
memorable change took place in his university days. 
‘When at Oxford,’ he says, ‘I took up William 
Law’s Serious Call, expecting to find it a dull book, 
and perhaps to laugh at it. But I found Law quite 
an overmatch for me, and this was the first occa- 
sion of my thinking in earnest about religion after I 
became capable of rational enquiry.’ From that 
moment, he became a profoundly religious man. 
‘Indeed,’ says Mr. A. C. Benson, ‘I know no figure 
in Biography which illustrates more precisely and 
more convincingly, the sort of religion of which 
the Englishman wholly approves. There was not 
a touch of priggishness about Dr. Johnson; he had 
no sort of sanctimoniousness; he said innumerably 
severe, humorous, sensible, provocative things. He 
was full of prejudices and fancies; but he was a 
wholly serious man, and, what is more remarkable, 
a devoutly religious man. He never suffered any- 
thing that was profane or sceptical, he disliked 
light-minded speculation on the mysteries of life 
and death; he had the firmest faith in revealed re- 
ligion and Christian doctrine.’ 

Among other things, he was a tremendous be- 


192 A Faggot of Torches 


liever in the Bible and in prayer. He read as many 
chapters of the Bible each day as would ensure his 
completing the entire book once a year. He loved 
the Church of England Prayer Book, but sometimes 
thought of collecting the best prayers in the lan- 
guage and putting them together in one volume. 
When his friends pressed him to carry out the idea, 
he suddenly grew agitated and exclaimed, ‘Let me 
alone! Let me alone! I am overpowered,’ and 
putting his hands before his face, he bent his head 
for some time over the table. Mrs. Thrale, in her 
Anecdotes, said that Johnson could never recite that 


majestic Latin hymn, the Dies Irae, without bursting . 


into tears. And who can forget that famous scene 
at the Literary Club, when one of the members hap- 
pened to quote a verse from the nineteenth Psalm 
and the doctor ‘caught fire, and, instantly taking off 
his hat, began with great solemnity, ““The spacious 
firmament on high,’ and went right through that 
beautiful hymn. Those who were acquainted with 
him know how harsh his features in general were; 
but upon this occasion his face was almost as if it 
had been the face of an angel.’ Very often, Bos- 
well tells us, he would see the doctor rocking him- 
self in his chair with an extraordinary see-saw 
movement, muttering away to himself as he did so, 
and, by straining his ears to catch the words, the 
biographer would realize that the doctor was 
praying. 

When nearing his fiftieth birthday the doctor re- 


: 
| 
: 
: 





Doctor Johnson’s Text 193 


views his past life and draws up a list of eight reso- 
lutions by means of which he hopes to shape the 
days to come. ‘Having lived,’ he says, ‘not without 
an ‘habitual reverence for the Sabbath, yet without 
that attention to its religious duties which Chris- 
tianity requires, I resolve henceforth—First, to rise 
early on Sabbath morning, and, in order to do that, 
to go to sleep early on Saturday night. Second, to 
use some more than ordinary devotion as soon as I 
rise. Third, to examine into the tenor of my life, 
and particularly the last week, and to mark my ad- 
vances in religion, or my recessions from it. Fourth 
to read the Scriptures methodically, with such helps 
as are at hand. Fifth, to goto church twice. Sixth, 
to read books of divinity, either speculative or prac- 
tical. Seventh, to instruct my family. Eighth, to 
wear off by meditation any worldly soil contracted 
in the week.’ : 

Moreover, this intensely religious man is intensely 
practical in his religion. In the most pitiful days of 
his poverty, his purse—for what it was worth—was 
always at the disposal of his still poorer friends. 
And look at this! ‘Coming home late one night,’ 
Boswell says, ‘the doctor found a poor woman lying 
in the street, so much exhausted that she could not 
walk; he took her on his back and carried her to his 
house, where he discovered that she was one of those 
wretched females who had fallen into the lowest 
state of vice, poverty, and disease. Instead of 
harshly upbraiding her, he had her taken care of 


104 A Faggot of Torches 


with all tenderness for a long time at considerable 
expense, and endeavoured to put her in a virtuous 
way of living.’ And was there ever such an asylum 
as that house at Gough Square? It was, as Macau- 
lay says, the home of the most extraordinary as- 
semblage of inmates that ever was brought together. 
‘It was a strange menagerie. All these poor crea- 
tures were at constant war with each other and with 
Johnson’s negro servant, Frank. Sometimes, in- 
deed, they transferred their hostilities from the ser- 
vant to the master, complained that a better table 
was not kept for them, and railed or whined until 
their benefactor was glad to escape to Mitre Tavern. 
And yet he who was so prompt to resent anything 
which looked like a slight on the part of a purse- 
proud bookseller, or a noble and powerful patron, 
bore from mendicants who, but for his bounty, must 
have gone to the poorhouse, the most provoking in- 
sults!’ Johnson’s religion revealed itself,even in his 
relations with his pets. He habitually went out 
himself to buy the cat’s food, lest his negro servant 
should feel degraded at being required to wait upon 
an animal, or lest, being put to the trouble, he should 
take a dislike to the poor creature! 


III 

Yet, although such an intensely religious man, 
applying his religion alike to the most momentous 
and to the most trivial affairs of life, the fact re- 
mains that he derived very little comfort. from it. 


a ee 


Doctor Johnson’s Text 195 


I wonder why! Surely Boswell can tell us! He 
can—and does! In the closing passage of his great- 
est of all biographies, Boswell says that the doctor 
spent all his days in the deep shadow thrown by one 
stupendous text. That text hung over his head like 
a thundercloud. It was this: Of him to whom 
much is given, much will be required. That text 
kept the soul of Samuel Johnson in perpetual twi- 
light. He was not ignorant—how could he be?—of 
his own greatness. He knew that to him many tal- 
ents had been committed and’ he dreaded the day 
of reckoning. Much will be required! The words 
perpetually haunted him, making solitude frightful 
‘This solemn text was ever in his mind,’ Boswell 
said: ‘making him dissatisfied with his labours and 
acts of goodness, however notable.’ 

He had the words: The Night Cometh! inscribed 
on the face of his watch, so that, whenever he con- 
sulted it, he might be stirred to vigilance and activ- 
ity. The Night Cometh! Dr. Johnson was like a 
nervous child, always dreading the dark. His text 
terrified him. Of him to whom much ts given, much 
will be required. “Death, my dear,’ he says, in one 
of his last letters, ‘is very dreadful.” That thought 
was the black dog, as he called it, that was always 
staring him in the face and always showing its 
teeth. ° As he advanced in life, he hated the ap- 
proach of a birthday; he was offended if his friends 
sent him greetings; he could not bear to think that 
his years were running out. A gladsome religion 


196 A Faggot of Torches 


was beyond his comprehension. He found fault 
with Dr. Blair for saying in a sermon that ‘the man 
who does not feel joy in religion is far from the 
kingdom of heaven.’ ‘There are many good men,’ 
replied Johnson, ‘whose fear of God predominates 
over their love.’ Among those who tried to intro- 
duce a little sunshine into his faith was Dr. Adams. 
‘I am terribly afraid of death,’ said Johnson; ‘l 
think I may be one of those who shall be damned!’ 
‘What do you mean by damned?’ asked Dr. Adams. 
‘Sent to hell, sir,’ replied the old doctor, “and pun- 
ished everlastingly.’ ‘Death,’ he says again, ‘is a 
terrible thing to face. The man who says he is not 
afraid of it, lies. Yet, as murderers have met it 
bravely on the scaffold, when the time comes so per- 
haps may I. In the meantime I am horribly afraid. 
The future is dark.’ One Good Friday morning— 
it was in 1773—Boswell and Johnson, having break- 
fasted together on tea and hot cross buns, attended 
the service at St. Clement Danes. ‘His behaviour 
was,’ says Boswell, ‘as I had imagined to myself, 
solemnly devout. I shall never forget the tremu- 
lous earnestness with which he pronounced the aw- 
ful petition in the Litany: “In the hour of death, 
and in the Day of Judgement, good Lord, deliver 
MSs ia: 

Of him to whom much is given, much wall be re- 
quired; that was Dr. Johnson’s text. 

In the hour of death, and in the Day of Judge- 
ment, good Lord, deliver us! that was Doctor John- 





Doctor Johnson’s Text 197 


son’s prayer. He lived all his days in the twi- 
light; yet sunshine came at last. 


IV 


As I have pointed out in my chapter on Augustus 
Topladys Text, Professor George Jackson says that 
he can never read Dr. Johnson’s Prayers and Medi- 
tations without wishing that Johnson and Toplady 
had met. ‘Johnson’s is such a moving little book,’ 
says Professor Jackson. ‘Can anyone read it and 
not be touched to the quick by the great, sad sin- 
cerity of soul which breathes through its every page, 
and at the same time without a sigh of regret that 
there was not some one at hand who could have 
shown Johnson a more excellent way? If only 
Toplady could have taught him to sing 


Nothing in my hand I bring. 
Simply to Thy cross I cling, 


what a difference it might have made! Religion 
would have been a bridge instead of a burden, some- 
thing to carry him instead of something for him to 
carry!’ But perhaps the old doctor caught a glimpse 
of the truth that set Toplady singing. Let us see! 

In his seventy-second year, Boswell says, Doctor 
Johnson repeated to Mr. Langton, with great en- 
ergy, the gracious words of forgiveness that our 
Saviour addressed to Mary Magdalene: Thy faith 
hath saved thee; go in peace. “The manner of this 
dismission,’ added the doctor, ‘is exceedingly affect- 


T98 A Faggot of Torches 


ing.’ I see something wonderfully suggestive in 
that earnest recital and especially in that emphatic 
remark. : 

By this time, to quote Macaulay again, the in- 
firmities of age were coming fast upon him. ‘That 
inevitable event of which he never thought without 
horror was brought near to him: and his whole life 
was darkened by the shadow of death. But when 
at length the moment, dreaded through so many 
years, came close, the dark cloud passed away from 
Johnson’s mind. His temper became unusually 
patient and gentle; he ceased to think with terror of 
death, and of that which lies beyond death; and he 


spoke much of the mercy of God and of the propi- 


tiation of Christ.’ . 

Dr. Brockelesby, his medical adviser, was with 
him to the last. He asked if he had any chance of 
recovery. “Give me,’ he begged, ‘a faithful answer.’ 
The doctor told him the truth. ‘Then,’ said John- 
son, “I will take no more physic, not even my opiates; 


for I desire to render up my soul to God unclouded!’ - 


‘For some time before ‘his death,’ says Dr. Brock- 
lesby, ‘all his fears were calmed. He talked to me 
about the necessity of faith in the sacrifice of Jesus 
as necessary, beyond all good works whatever, for 
the salvation of mankind. He pressed me to study 
Dr. Clarke and to read his sermons. I asked him 
why he specially commended: Dr. Clarke, and he re- 
plied that it was because Dr. Clarke made most of 
Christ’s redeeming sacrifice.’ He sent for Frank, 


a 


Doctor Johnson’s Text 199 


his negro servant. ‘Attend, Frank, above all else,’ 
he pleaded, ‘to the salvation of your soul—that is 
of supreme importance.’ He took the Communion 
and, before doing so, lifted up his trembling voice 
in prayer. 

‘Almighty and Most Merciful Father,’ he prayed, 
‘I am now, as to human eyes it seems, about to com- 
memorate, for the last time, the death of my Re- | 
deemer. Grant, O Lord, that my whole hope and 
confidence may be in His merits and Thy mercy; 
enforce and accept my imperfect repentance; and 
make the death of Thy Son effectual to my redemp- 
tion. Pardon the multitude of my offences; sup- 
port me in the hour of death; and receive me to 
everlasting happiness, for the sake of Jesus Christ. 
Amen.’ 

What is this but a tempest-tossed soul clinging to 
the Rock of Ages? 

Nothing in my hand I bring. 
Simply to Thy cross I cling. 

The old doctor’s face was turned toward the sun- 
rise after all! Even Augustus Toplady could have 
taught him nothing more. 


XVII 
BLAISE PASCAL’S TEXT 


I 


THE conversion of Blaise Pascal is one of the shin- 
ing events in the stately history of the Christian 
Church. Seldom has so mighty an intellect submit- 
ted with such perfect grace to the authority of the 
Saviour. Pascal is not only one of the world’s 
epoch-makers; he is one of the architects of civiliza- 
tion. Every day of our lives we all of us do things 
that, but for Pascal, we could never have done. 
Every day of our lives we enjoy comforts and 
privileges that, but for him, could never have been 
ours. His commanding personality and triumphant 
reason dominate human life at every turn. He is 
one of history’s quiet conquerors; he does not ad- 
vertise himself; his work does not lend itself to 
parade or display; yet, put him among the giants of 
the past, and most of them are instantly dwarfed 
by his presence. Few names, as Principal Tulloch 
says, are more classical than his. “Though cut off 
at the early age of thirty-nine, there is hardly any 
name more famous at once in literature, science, 
and religion.’ For three centuries every thinker of 
note has been profoundly influenced by him. The 
annals of France glitter with a multitude of bril- 
200 


Blaise Pascal’s Text 201 


liant personalities; but none of them shine with a 
lustre that is comparable to that of Pascal. 


II 


He was only a youth when he shook the dust of 
the world from his feet and entered upon the life of 
a lay solitary at Port Royal; yet the amazing thing 
is that, by that time, he had established a reputation 
for mathematical audacity, philosophical originality, 
and scientific ingenuity which no record in the 
world’s long history can rival. He was, Bossuet 
says, endowed by Nature with all the gifts of un- 
derstanding; a geometer of the first rank; a pro- 
found logician, a lofty and eloquent writer. If, 
Bossuet maintains, we scan a list of his inventions 
and discoveries, and then reflect that, in addition, 
he wrote one of the most perfect works that has 
ever appeared in the French language, and that in 
all his books there are passages of unrivalled elo- 
quence and depth of reflection, we shall come to the 
conclusion that a greater genius never existed in 
any country or in any age. Again and again, whilst 
Pascal was a mere boy, Paris was electrified by his 
dazzling discoveries. As one reads the romantic 
and almost incredible story of those early years, it 
is impossible to repress a conjecture as to the part 
that he would have played in the history of the 
world, and the sensational changes that he would 
have effected, if he had persisted in the career to 
which he devoted his earlier years, and if he had 


202 A Faggot of Torches 


been spared to old age in the pursuit of those re- 
searches. 

The bent of his mind betrayed itself as soon as he 
was out of his cradle. Like John Stuart Mill, he 
was educated by his father. Like the elder Mill, the 
elder Pascal had ideas of his own concerning the in- 
tellectual development and ultimate career of his 
boy. But there is an essential difference between 
the two cases. John Stuart Mill loyally adopted 
his father’s ideas and dutifully followed the path 
that had been prepared for his feet. Blaise Pascal, 
on the contrary, rebelled against the programme 
mapped out for him, and eventually brought his 
father to his own way of thinking. 

The elder Pascal was obsessed by one all-master- 
ing prejudice. He was determined, come what 
might, that his boy should have nothing to do with 
mathematics. He was himself a mathematician; 
and experience had taught him that the study of 
mathematics captivates and monopolizes the mind 
to the exclusion of all other themes. He therefore 
set himself to guard his son’s mind from all contact 
with mathematical lore. Every book that touched 
on mathematical problems was carefully concealed; 
in the presence of the boy the father abstained from 
discussing mathematical topics with his friends; 
and, to make matters absolutely secure, the father 
set his son such difficult lessons in Latin and other 
languages as would leave him neither time nor en- 
ergy nor inclination for the speculations that he so 


Blaise Pascal’s Text 203 


ardently desired him to eschew. But, in ail this, 
the elder Pascal resembles nothing so much as an 
anxious hen frantically endeavouring to teach her 
brood of ducklings to avoid the water towards 
which all the instincts of their nature are impelling 
them. 
Til 

As a child Pascal was characterized by an extra- 
ordinary and insatible curiosity. It was not merely 
the passive curiosity that smiles, wonders, and passes 
on: it was the active curiosity that insists on inves- 
tigating the why and the wherefore of each arresting 
circumstance and phenomenon. He was little more 
than an infant when he noticed that a plate, struck 
with a knife, emits a loud and lingering sound; but 
that, as soon as a hand is laid upon it; the sound in- 
stantly ceases. Every child has noticed this, and 
has been interested and amused by it: but the matter 
has ended there. Pascal, however, immediately ini- 
tiated a series of experiments based upon this cur- 
ious happening. Why did the knife awaken the 
sound? Why did the fingers silence it? The boy 
was soon working out a philosophy of sounds. His 
father had forbidden his meddling with geometry in 
any form; but the temptation was too great. In the 
secrecy of his own room he kept a supply of char- 
coal and a few boards. On these he practised mak- 
ing circles that should be perfectly round, triangles 
whose angles should be exactly equal, and other 
figures of the kind. Working away by himself, he 


204 A Faggot of Torches 


came, quite independently, to many of the conclu- 
sions elaborated by Euclid. On one such occasion, 
the father crept into the room on tiptoe. The boy 
Was so engrossed in his demonstrations that for 
some time he was unaware of his father’s presence. 
The father stood for a while dumbfounded. He 
felt as the hen may be supposed to feel when she 
sees the ducklings well out on the pond. He recog- 
nized that the boy was in his element. Startled by 
the brilliance of his son’s genius, he left the room 
without saying a word. And, with a wisdom that 
does him credit, he strode off to the city to secure for 
the youth teachers who would be able to assist him 
along the line for which he had so obvious a bent. 
At the age of sixteen, Pascal wrote his famous 
treatise on Conic Sections. The most brilliant 
Frenchmen of the time were staggered. With one 
accord they declared that it was the most powerful 
and valuable contribution that had been made to 
mathematical science since the days of Archimedes. 
Whilst still in his ’teens, Pascal made up his mind 
that Science, to fulfil its destiny, must relate itself 
to the industry and commerce of the workaday 
world. Acting on this principle, he began by in- 
venting a calculating machine and finished by in- 
venting, on his deathbed, the commonplace but use- 
ful vehicle that we now call an omnibus. ‘The dif- 
ficulties involved in the construction of the calcu- 
lating machine prevented its being of much use to 
his own generation; but, later on, those obstacles 


Blaise Pascal’s Text 205 


were overcome, and the contrivance of Pascal paved 
the way for all the cash registers and adding-ma- 
chines of our modern shops and offices. But perhaps 
the greatest triumph of Pascal’s genius was his dis- 
covery that atmosphere has definite weight, and that 
the level of the mercury varies in different altitudes 
and different weather. Sir David Brewster has 
given us a vivid and amusing description of the ex- 
periments made by Pascal first at the base, and then 
at the summit, of the Puy-de-Dome on the memo- 
rable day on which he established his historic con- 
clusions. On that day—Saturday, September 109, 
1648—Pascal virtually gave us the barometer, and 
thus made a contribution to the science of meteor- 
ology which it is impossible now to overvalue. This 
triumph led him to his prolonged series of re- 
searches concerning the equilibrium of fluids; and 
there are those who regard his treatise on this sub- 
ject as his crowning achievement. But, however 
that may be, there he stands! He is still in the 
twenties; yet all the world knows him as a thinker 
of unsurpassed brilliance and audacity; as a scien- 
tist who knows how to harness the most profound 
erudition to the most practical ends; and as a writer 
who can express the most abstruse ideas in lan- 
guage that a little child can understand. 


IV 


The greatest day in Pascal’s life was the day of 
his conversion. Except in the light of that momen- 


206 A Faggot of Torches 


tous happening, his biography is unintelligible. As 
Dean Church puts it, the religion of Pascal is essen- 
tially the religion of ‘a converted man. He was 
thirty-one at the time; and so overwhelming was 
the flood-tide of divine grace that came surging into 
his heart that, to the day of his death, he wore, 
stitched into his doublet, a piece of parchment on 
which he had recorded the exact hour of that unfor- 
gettable experience. It was im the year of grace 
1654, on Monday the twenty-third of November, 
from half-past ten in the evening until half an hour 
after midnight. 

Yet whilst in one sense, that conversion of his 
was so sudden and cataclysmic that he can chronicle 
with the utmost definiteness the precise moment at 
which it took place, there is another sense in which 
it was very gradual. I can trace its slow develop- 
ment. Eight years earlier, in 1646, a number of ex- 
cellent books had fallen into his hands. This course 
of reading so affected him, his sister tells us, that 
he came to the conclusion that, to be a Christian, a 
man ought to live only for God and to seek no ob- 
ject but His pleasure. “This became so evident to 
my brother, and so imperative, that he relinquished 
for a time all his scientific researches and set him- 
self to seek that one thing needful of which our 
Lord has spoken.’ 

Having once applied himself to this sublime quest, 
he kept his eyes wide open. The most arresting 
object on his horizon was the exquisite beauty of 


Blaise Pascal’s Text 207 


his sister’s life. In earlier days, his studious ways 
had rebuked her frivolity and led her to seriousness : 
now her devotion shames his worldliness. She led 
a life of such sweetness, unselfishness, and charm 
that her very presence was a perpetual benediction 
on everybody in the house. It was a poignant grief 
to her to see her brother, to whom she felt that she 
owed the grace that she herself enjoyed, bemoaning 
the destitution of his own soul. She saw him fre- 
quently, pitied him increasingly, and pleaded with 
him to abandon everything that clogged his spirit 
and to yield himself without reserve to the Saviour. 

The momentous crisis was precipitated at length 
by accident. ‘One day,’ says Bossuet, ‘when he 
went to take his daily drive to the bridge of Neuilly 
in a carriage and four, the two leading horses be- 
came restive at a point at which the road was 
bounded by a parapet over the river. They reared 
and plunged and eventually, to the horror of the on- 
lookers, flung themselves over the stonework into 
the Seine. Fortunately, the first strokes of their 
feet broke the traces which bound them to the pole, 
and the carriage hung suspended on the brink of the 
parapet. The effect of such a shock to a man of 
Pascal’s feeble health may be imagined. He swooned 
away and was restored only with difficulty. His 
nerves were so shattered that, long afterwards, dur- 
ing sleepless nights and moments of weakness, he 
seemed to see a precipice at his bedside over which 
he was on the point of falling.’ This happened in 


208 A Faggot of Torches 


October, 1654; a month later he found joy and 
peace in believing. ‘On the night of the twenty- 
third of November,’ says Madame Duclaux, ‘he 
found himself unable to sleep, and lay in bed read- 
ing the Scriptures. Suddenly his eyes dazzled; a 
flame of fire seemed to envelop him. Such a mo- 
ment of marvellous euphoria could never be for- 
gotten, and, in mortal words, could never be ex- 
pressed. It found natural utterance in floods of 
tears and in that fragmentary speech which, like so 
many sobs, Pascal employs in that mystic Memorial 
which thenceforth he ever wore in secret, sewn into 
his clothes like a talisman. Here it is: 


FIRE! 
Certainty! Joy! Peace! 
I forget the world and everything but God! 
Righteous Father, the world hath 
not known Thee, but I have known Thee! 
Joy, Joy, Joy! Tears of Joy! 
Jesus! 
Jesus! 
I separated myself from Him; renounced and 
crucified Hm! 
They have forsaken ME, the fountain of living 
waters ! 
I separated myself from HIM! 
May I not be separated from Him eternally! 
I submit myself absolutely to 
JESUS CHRIST MY REDEEMER. 


Blaise Pascal’s Text 209 


In that. hour, Blaise Pascal, the mightiest thinker 
of his time, was converted! ‘All in a moment,’ as 
Viscount St. Cyres puts it, ‘he was touched by God. 
He was caught in the grip of a mysterious Power. 
Some strange spiritual chemistry blotted out his 
former tastes and inclinations and left him a new 
being.’ He himself called it his conversion; and, in 
order that others might share with him the rapture 
of so radiant an experience, he sat down almost at 
once and wrote his treatise On the Conversion of 
the Sinner, And, if ever we are tempted to sup- 
pose that his fire-baptism was simply one moment 
of frenzy punctuating a life of scholarly frigidity, 
we are confronted by the significant circumstance 
that, to his dying day, he wore the Memorial next 
to his heart. He was loyal to his vision to the end. 
‘And so,’ he wrote, when nearing his goal, ‘and so 
I stretch forth my hands to my Redeemer, who came 
to earth to suffer and to die for me.’ In that faith— 
so simple yet so sublime—so personal yet so pro- 
found—Pascal rested serenely to the last. 

My people have committed two evils: they have 
forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and 
hewed out to themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, 
that can hold no water, ‘This is the passage that 
Was running in Pascal’s mind that November mid- 
night; and he inscribed it across the very centre of 
his historic Memorial. 

‘His eyes had been opened,’ says Dean Church. 
“He felt himself touched and overcome by the great- 


210 A Faggot of Torches 


ness and the reasonableness of things unseen. He 
consciously turned to God, not from vice, but from 
the bondage of the interests of time, from the fas- 
cination of a merely intellectual life and from the 
frivolity which forgets the other world in this.’ 

Here then are the cisterns, the broken cisterns that 
can hold no water—‘the bondage of the interests of 
time; from the fascination of a merely intellectual 
life; the frivolity which forgets the other world in 
this !’ 

And here is the fountain of lving waters that he 
for so long forsook! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus 
Christ my Redeemer! From that November mid- 
night, Jesus was everything to Pascal—everything! 
‘His whole argument,’ says Viscount St. Cyres, 
‘centres in the person of the Redeemer.’ ‘To him,’ 
says Principal Tulloch, ‘Christ was the only solu- 


tion of all human perplexities.’ From the age of | 


thirty-one to the day of his death, at the age of 
thirty-nine, he had but one desire: he lived that he 
might turn the thoughts of his fellow men to his 
Saviour. 

It may be that, during those last years of his 
brief life, he devoted less time to science, although, 
as his biographers are careful to show, he by no 
means relinquished it. But, as against this, we must 
remember that, during those closing years, he wrote 
a book that will be treasured as long as the world 
stands. Lord Avebury included it in his list of the 
best books ever written. And nobody has read 





= ’ . 
= s ee ee a 


Blaise Pascal’s Text 211 


Pascal’s Thoughts without being lifted by it into a 
clearer atmosphere and helped to a loftier plane. 
Blaise Pascal was endowed with a soul of singu- 
larly delicate texture. He had a mind that was 
amazingly sensitive to all those vibrations by which 
truth reveals itself to men; he had an eye that was 
quick to see beauty in whatever form it presented 
itself; he had a heart that insistently hungered for 
the sublime. In his early days he saw the High 
and it entranced him; but on that never-to-be-for- 
gotten November night, he saw the Highest. With- 
out reserve and without delay he laid all this mar- 
vellous faculties of heart and brain at the feet of the 
Saviour Who, that night, had revealed himself in 
such a bewildering wealth of power and grace. 


XVIII 
LEO: TOLSTOYS TEAL 


I 


Tuts dried-up little man sitting on the stone bench 
in the shade of the cypress tree, looking so very 
lean, so very small and so very gray, scarcely strikes 
you as being in many ways the most notable figure 
on the world’s horizon. And yet on closer scrutiny 
you catch a hint of an unplumbed depth within 
him. ‘He gives you the impression,’ says Maxim 
Gorky, ‘of having just arrived from some distant 
country, where people think and feel differently, and 
their relations and language are different. He sits 
in solitude, tired and gray, as though the dust of 
another earth were on him, and he looks attentively 
at everything with the look of a foreigner or of a 
dumb man. His eyes are keen, his glance piercing, 
his face wrinkled, his beard white and long. He 
listens attentively, as though recalling something 
which he has forgotten, or as though waiting for 
something new and unknown.’ 

This shrivelled. but impressive old man, drawing 
near to the end of his long eventful day, is Leo 
Tolstoy; and, for nearly a generation, Leo Tol- 

212 


Leo Tolstoy’s Text 213 


stoy has been the most striking and picturesque per- 
sonality in Europe. “During the last twenty years 
of his life,’ says Mr. George R. Noyes, “he was the 
best-known citizen in the world of thought; his por- 
trait and the general type of his personality were as 
familiar as those of his antithesis, Prince Bismarck. 
When he died, no writer remained whose fame even 
distantly compared with his own. His works had 
been translated into almost all civilized languages 
and. had been read by millions of men and women, 
from academicians to peasants and factory labour- 
ers. No other author has ever attained during his 
own lifetime such universal fame as Tolstoy.’ ‘He 
is the most notable man of letters now living,’ wrote 
Mr. Stead, nearly forty years ago; ‘there is no Rus- 
sian so famous; and, outside Russia, there is no lit- 
erary personality so conspicuous. His novels are 
read everywhere, in every language; his ideas at- 
tract the attention of everybody who thinks. He 
has been a soldier, a man of the world, a student, a 
recluse, a visionary, and a reformer. He is at once 
a great genius, a consummate artist, and a religious 
apostle.’ Every spiritual pilgrimage is worth trac- 
ing; but few are more intricate, more involved or 
more instructive than is his. 

Leo Tolstoy was the most persistent and most 
passionate seeker that the world has ever known. 
His whole life was a search. Was ever a quest so 
penetrating and so audacious? He found himself 
endowed with the mystery of life and he was re- 


214 A Faggot of Torches 


solved to know the reason why. Who had sent him 
into the world? What end was his life designed to 
compass? what was to become of him after he had 
succeeded—or failed? In seeking a solution of these 
riddles he overhauled the universe and ransacked 
everything in it. He took nothing for granted. 
He closed his mind against no conclusion, however 
improbable or however appalling. Every guess that 
the philosophers had made was worthy of attention ; 
every theory was entitled to painstaking examina- 
tion. In his daring search, he knocked at the door 
of heaven and rattled at the gates of hell. He scaled 
the heights and sounded the depths. Nothing was 
too exalted, and nothing too debased, for investiga- 
tion. He sought through boyhood, youth, man- 
hood, and old age. He lived seeking and died seek- 
ing’; yet, between his earlier seeking and his later 
seeking, there was an eternity of difference. For, 
when the silver was creeping into his hair, he came 
to see that there is virtue in seeking as well as in 
finding; indeed, that there is greater virtue in seek- 
ing than in finding. After he made that notable dis- 
covery, he still sought; but he sought with a smile 
on his face and a song in his heart. He still sought, 
for he had learned from Pascal that seeking is itself 
success; ‘thou wouldst not seek Him if thou hadst 
not already found Him.’ He still sought, for, 
strangely enough, he found in the very act of seek- 
ing the answer to his lifelong question. Why had 
he been sent into the world? He had been sent into 





Leo Tolstoy’s Text 215 


the world to seek! But perhaps I had better let him 
state his surprising conclusion in his own way. 


Lip 


Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and Hts right- 
eousness: this is Tolstoy’s text. In one of his later 
works, I find it inscribed on almost every page. 

‘What is the aim of human life?’ he asks, repeat- 
ing the question that had baffled him for so many 
years. “What is the aim of human life? Why do I 
live? Only religion can answer that question. And 
this is the answer: Seek ye first the Kmgdom of 
God and His righteousness, and all these things 
shall be added unto you. Living to ourselves, we 
seek happiness and do not find it: but seeking first 
the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, we ob- 
tain peace, freedom, and joy without seeking them.” 

‘Look at yourself,’ he says again, ‘and understand 
who you are, and what you are, and what you live 
for. The personal good of the individual man, or 
even of the family or of the State, cannot be the 
ultimate aim of life. The meaning of human life 
does not consist in each mdn’s acquiring his per- 
sonal and short-lived good at the expense of an- 
other. The meaning of your life can only be the 
fulfilment of His will who, for the attainment of 
His ends, has sent you into this life. You must un- 
derstand that your life is not yours, not your prop- 
erty, but His who produced it for His own pur- 


216 A Faggot of Torches 


poses. The highest possible good can be yours only 
on condition that you do His will. ‘Therefore, 
above all else, seek ye first the Kingdom of God and 
His righteousness, and all these things shall be added 
unto you.’ 

This is the essence of Tolstoyism; it represents 
his teaching in a nutshell. As a result of all his 
seeking, he found that he was to seek still. He had 
come into the world to seek. Seek ye first the King- 
dom of God and His righteousness. 

“You would not know Leo,’ wrote the Countess 
to a friend, in 1881, ‘he is so changed. He has be- 
come a Christian, and he remains one, so steadfast 
and true!’ 

This is the end of the long, long quest. 1 won- 
der if we can trace the steps by which he reached 
that sublime conclusion? 


Ill 


One only searches for a thing of which he feels 
the need. The first step in a great search is the 
dawn of the desire. I catch odd, but significant 
glimpses of Leo Tolstoy in the days in which the 
yearning of his heart is beginning to assert itself. 
He is a little boy—shockingly plain and extremely 
sensitive about it. At times he is so oppressed by a 
consciousness of his unattractiveness that he runs 
away and hides himself in the woods. In the course 
of one of these solitary expeditions, a startling 
thought takes possession of him, Perhaps he found 


= 





Leo Tolstoy’s Text 217 


a dead bird among the autumn leaves, or a dead 
squirrel lying stiff and stark, under a beech tree. 
At any rate, he confronts the fact of death, Every- 
thing dies. He must die. What then? It seems to 
him that the only sensible course is to enjoy the 
present: the future is clearly beyond our ken. He 
therefore hurries home; tucks himself cosily in bed; 
reads exciting novels, and sucks as many sweet- 
meats as his pocket-money will provide! 

I see him again. He isa little older. He and his 
brother Nicholas—who is six years his senior—are 
digging a grave on a lonely hillside. But what are 
they burying? These two youths have formed a 
society: it is called the ‘Ant-Brothers’; it is to em- 
brace all mankind in a union of sympathy and affec- 
tion. They have decided to bury a green stick as a 
kind of charm to celebrate the founding of this 
sublime society. On that very spot, more than sev- 
enty years afterwards, another burial took place. 
For, when Tolstoy lay dying, he begged that he 
might be laid to rest where he and Nicholas buried 
the green stick long years ago. That spot will 
always represent one of humanity’s most cherished 
places of pilgrimage. 

Then, as the Confession shows, he plunges into 
the abyss. ‘I remember,’ he says, ‘that in my 
twelfth year, a boy, now long since dead, a pupil 
in the gymnasium, spent a Sunday with us and 
brought us the news of the last discovery in the 
gymnasium, namely, that there was no God, and that 


218 A Faggot of Torches 


all we were taught on that subject was a pure inven- 
tion. How interested we were! We all eagerly ac- 
cepted the theory as something particularly attrac- 
tive and possibly quite true.’ Thus he lost God, but 
it was not a very great loss. For until then, he 
says, he had believed in God, or rather, he had not 
denied God; but in what God he so languidly be- 
lieved he could not have said. Then, for years, like 
a ship without chart and compass, he drifted at the 
mercy of every gust that blew. | 

‘I cannot recall these years,’ he tells us, ‘without 
horror and disgust. I killed men in war; I chal- 
lenged others to duels in order to kill them; I squan- 
dered money at cards; I ill-treated my peasantry; I 
rioted with loose women; I deceived men. Lying, 
robbery, adultery, fornication, drunkenness, vio- 
lence, murder—there was no crime that I left un- 
committed; and yet I was considered by my equals 
as a comparatively moral man.’ 

And yet, beneath all this, there is something 
deeper. For all the time, he honestly desired to be a 
good and virtuous and useful man; “but every time 
I tried to express the longings of my heart I was 
met with contempt and derisive laughter; but, di- 
rectly I gave way to the lowest of my passions, I 
was praised and encouraged.’ And so, as Mrs. 
Creighton says, we see the young Tolstoy, loving 
pleasure, eager to shine as a man of fashion, indulg- 
ing freely in the vicious habits of the young men 
of his day, but with a constant sense of discontent 





Leo Tolstoy’s Text 219 


with himself, a constant effort after a higher life. 
He is always making rules for his life, and always 
breaking them. The whole story, as Mr. Winstan- 
ley, points out, shows the agony of a great soul 
struggling in the deepest abysses. of doubt, astray 
in a universe where all seems chaotic, dark, and 
meaningless, with no firm footing anywhere. In a 
word, Tolstoy is lost! He is lost, but he is seeking; 
he is seeking, but he is lost! 


IV 


In his extremity, he sees three possible means of 
escape. 

(1) He can hark back to his childish philosophy 
—the philosophy of the sweetmeats and the novels. 
‘Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die!’ He 
can drown thought in delirious enjoyments. 

(2) He can commit suicide. The thought so fas- 
cihated him that, for years, he had all ropes hidden 
from his sight and refused to carry a gun lest the 
sudden temptation should be too strong for him. 

(3) He could become, at least externally, reli- 
gious. ‘Tolstoy sought, passionately and despair- 
ingly, to gain his faith; he conformed to all the cere- 
monial requirements of the Greek Church; prayed 
morning and evening; fasted and prepared for the 
Communion; he took a pleasure in sacrificing his 
bodily comfort by kneeling and by rising to attend 
early service; he took pleasure, too, in mortifying 


220 A Faggot of Torches 


his intellectual pride by forcing himself to believe 
doctrines which he had formerly condemned.’ 


V 

Tolstoy was fifty when, very abruptly, the light 
broke upon him. ‘My whole life,’ he says, ‘under- 
went a sudden transformation. Everything was 
completely changed.’ It was, he tells us, as if he 
had long been adrift in an open boat, lost on a waste 
of waters, and had all at once sighted the shore. 

At fifty, Tolstoy was a man of world-wide fame. 
He had achieved distinction as a novelist; was ex- 
tremely wealthy; and, physically, was immensely 
strong. He had a beautiful estate, devoted servants, 
congenial friends, and was happy in his home, in 
his wife, and in ‘this family. But the old craving 
was still there, and his greatest satisfaction lay in 
exchanging spiritual experiences with the peasants 
about the farm. Monks, priests, and theologians 
had failed to help him; but there was something 
about the fervant faith of these ploughmen and 
drovers that profoundly appealed to him. Profes- 
sor William James and Mr. G. H. Perris both 
likened Tolstoy to Bunyan. The spiritual analogy 
is very close. The light came to Bunyan through 
listening to the conversation of four poor women 
sitting in the sun; the mind of Tolstoy was illu- 
mined by the conversation of his peasantry. But, 
stimulating as was the talk of the peasants, it was 
in an hour of solitude that the crisis came. He is in 





Leo Tolstoy’s Text 221 


the woods, alone. ‘I was thinking of only one thing,’ 
he says, ‘I was seeking after God. Long ago I 
should have killed myself had I not cherished a 
dim hope of one day finding Him.’ That reflection 
threw open the gates of salvation. For if, as it 
seemed to him now, he had really lived only when 
he had been seeking God, then God must have been 
with him all the time! . “Thou wouldst not have 
sought Him,’ said Pascal, ‘if thou hadst not already 
found Him! Tolstoy was dazzled by excess of 
light. “What more do I seek?’ a voice seemed to 
cry within him. ‘This is He—He without whom 
there is no life! To know God and to live are one! 
God is life! Live to seek God and life will not be 
without Him!’ 

‘My God, I thank Thee!’ he cried; swallowed 
down the sobs that arose; and brushed away with 
both hands the tears that filled his eyes. 

‘One is bewildered,’ says Mr. Arthur C. Turber- 
ville, ‘by the constant changefulness of Tolstoy’s 
life up to this point. His was a heart that knew 
no rest. He tried everything, yet nothing for long. 
From the moment of the great change, however, he 
never deviated. _ All that he had previously dreamed 
of goodness, purity, peace, and love, flashed upon 
him with all the force of a revelation from the pic- 
ture of Jesus in the gospels. Christ made his as- 
pirations tangible.’ 

From that hour he set himself, with all the in- 
tensity of his being, to seek first the Kingdom of 


222 A Faggot of Torches 


God and His righteousness, and to call upon others 
to do the same. The words were continually upon 
his lips and they trickled more easily than any others 
from his pen. 

Seek! 

Seek first! I once preached on the text in New 
Zealand. As I concluded, an old lady of seventy- 
two rose from her seat and, in the presence of the 
whole congregation, came and kneeled at the rail 
at my feet. ‘I’ve left it very late,’ she said, during 
the singing of the hymn, ‘but when you kept say- 
ing: Seek first! Seek first! Seek first! 1 couldn’t 
wait a moment longer. Do you think I’ve left it 
too long?’ For fifteen years after that she main- 
tained a wonderful ministry in that congregation 
pleading with the young men and maidens not to re- 
peat her sad mistake. 

Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His right- 
eousness and all these things shall be added unto you. 

And so Tolstoy sought and found—and sought 
still. He died a joyous seeker. ‘He remains,’ says 
Mr. A. C. Benson, ‘he remains one of the most 
impressive figures of the century. As a writer 
he was a man of amazing genius, and yet this was 
by no means the best or even the greatest part of 
him. He may be described as one of the most typi- 
cal human beings that ever lived, because in his 
spirit the temptations and basenesses of humanity 
and its virtues and grandeurs, all at a white-hot in- 
tensity of passion, waged a ceaseless strife. Few in- 





Leo Tolstoy’s Text 223 


deed are like him, yet few can read his writings 
without feeling in some degree or other his likeness 
to themselves. It is this that gives him a surpassing 
fascination, that he is a sinner close to the heart of 
the sinful world doomed to death, and yet a passion- 
ate seeker after God; proud and defiant, and yet with 
a deep sincerity desiring to serve the law of Christ.’ 
Yes, that is it: a sinner close to the heart of the 
sinful world, he calls all men everywhere to seek 
first the Kingdom; and the wise will lose not a mo- 
ment in responding to that earnest and insistent call. 


XIX 
HOPEFUL’S TEXT 


I 
WHEN the pilgrims were taking a reluctant fare- 
well of the Delectable Mountains, the shepherds who 
had so hospitably entertained. them warned them 
concerning the Enchanted Ground that lay but a 
short distance ahead of them. ‘Beware,’ they said, 
‘of sleeping there; for he who sleeps on the En- 
chanted Ground will never wake again! When, 
however, the pilgrims reached the treacherous and 
seductive spot, they were so drowsy that they could 
scarcely keep their eyelids apart. Hopeful pleaded 
for one little nap, but Christian would not hear of it. 
And, to put the matter beyond the pale of possibil- 
ity, he made his companion talk. ‘Tell me,’ he said, 
‘by what means you were led to go on pilgrimage.’ 
And, when Hopeful unfolded his story, it turned, as 
so many stories do, upon a text. He told how, in 
his anxiety and concern, he had opened his mind to 
Faithful. For Hopeful was a citizen of Vanity 
Fair and it was at Vanity Fair that Faithful had 
suffered martyrdom. And Faithful, he explained, 
had urged him to look in his distress to Jesus and 
to cry to God for mercy. 
224 


Hopeful’s Text 225 


‘And,’ asked Christian, partly because he was in- 
terested and partly because he was anxious to keep 
his companion talking, ‘did you do as you were bid- 
den?’ 

‘Yes,’ replied Hopeful, ‘over and over and: over 
again.’ 

‘And did the Father reveal the Son to you?’ 

‘Not at first, nor second, nor third, nor fourth, 
nor fifth, no, nor at the sixth time neither.’ 

‘What did you do then?’ 

‘What! Why, I could not tell what to do.’ 

‘Had you no thoughts of leaving off praying?’ 

‘Yes, an hundred times, twice told.’ 

‘And what was the reason you did not?’ 

‘This word from Habakkuk came into my mind: 
I will stand upon my watch, and set me upon the 
tower, and will watch to see what He will say unto 
me. ... Though the vision tarry, wait for tt; be- 
cause it will surely come; it will not tarry. So I 
continued praying until the Father showed me the 
Son.’ 

‘And how,’ asked Christian, determined that the 
conversation, once started, should know no lull, 
‘how was He revealed to you?’ 

‘One day,’ replied Hopeful, ‘I was very sad; sad- 
der, I think, than I had ever been before; and this 
sadness was through a fresh sight of the greatness 
and vileness of my sins. And as I was then looking 
for nothing but the everlasting damnation of my 
soul, suddenly, as I thought, I saw the Lord Jesus 


226. A Faggot of Torches 


look down from heaven upon me, saying: “Believe 
on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.” 
“But,” I replied, “I am a great, a very great sinner, 


O Lord!’ and He answered: “My grace is suffi- — 


cient for thee!’ And now was my heart full of joy, 
mine eyes full of tears and mine affections running 
over!’ 

And so Hopeful told how, by means of the text, 
he was led into the faith that persevered and over- 
came; and, by the mere telling of the story, he and 
his fellow pilgrim were saved. from sleeping on the 
Enchanted Ground. 


II 

Habakkuk is the sceptic of the Old Testament as 
Thomas is the sceptic of the New. He stands in a 
maze of bewilderment. He cannot reconcile fact 
and faith. If God is in His heaven, why are things 
as they are? The earth, he cries, is deluged in wick- 
edness; the innocent are like fish caught in the ty- 
rant’s drag-net; right is on the scaffold and wrong 
is-on the throne! It is the old, old mystery: the 
problem that has shaken the faith alike of the sim- 
pleton and of the sage. It has sent men like Goethe 
and women like George Eliot out into the bleak wil- 
derness of doubt and uncertainty; it has puzzled 
minds not given to suspicion and distrust. 

‘God lets them! cried poor George Harris, in 
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as he bitterly enumerated the 
atrocities committed by the pitiless slave-holders. 





Hopeful’s Text 227 


He writhes at the thought that, do what he may, he 
is still a slave and that his wife and child may be 
sold away from him at any moment. “They buy 
and sell us, and make trade of our heart’s blood and 
groans and tears, and God lets them, He does; God 
lets them! 

And Dickens has shown how poor demented 
Barnaby Rudge was baffled by the same acute per- 
plexity. Gabriel Vardon comes upon Barnaby, the 
lunatic lad, at dead of night, bending over the pros- 
trate, bleeding form of a man who has fallen a vic- 
tim to highway robbery. ‘See,’ says Barnaby, ‘when 
I talk of eyes the stars come out! Whose eyes are 
they? If they are angels’ eyes, why do they look 
down here and see good men hurt, and only wink 
and sparkle all the night?’ 

That is the question—Barnaby’s question; George 
Harris’s question; my question; everybody’s ques- 
tion! The distinction of Habakkuk lies not in the 
question, but in the answer. He simply declines to 
answer it. ‘I do not understand,’ he says, ‘so I will 
keep an open mind. I will stand; I will watch; I 
will tarry; I will wait with patience till the explana- 
tion comes!’ In his Foundations of Zoology, Pro- 
fessor W. K. Brooks declares that the hardest of 
intellectual virtues is philosophic doubt. “Suspended 
judgement,’ he adds, ‘is the supreme triumph of in- 
tellectual discipline.’ It is the glory of Habakkuk 
that he develops that hardest of all the intellectual 
virtues and achieves that ‘supreme triumph of in- 


228 A Faggot of Torches 


tellectual discipline.’ | Anybody, seeing difficulties in 
belief, can rush to unbelief; anybody, finding faith 
in seeming conflict with the facts of life, can aban- 
don faith. Habakkuk declines to do anything of 
the kind. He knows a more excellent way. 

‘T will stand upon my watch, he says, ‘and set me 
upon the tower, and will watch to see what He will 
say unto me... . Though the vision tarry, wait 
for tt; because tt will surely come; it will not tarry, 


III 
Habakkuk is the supreme example of the Jealousy 
of a@ Staggering Faith. ‘To the watch-tower! he 
says; he realizes that he has something to guard. 
“To the ramparts! he says; he realizes that he has 
something to hold. 
On my watch-tower will I stand, 
And take up my post on the rampart; 
I will watch to see what He says to me 
And what answer I get back to my plea. 
The translation is that of Principal Sir George 
Adam Smith. ‘Through these words,’ says that 
greatest of our Hebrew scholars, ‘through these 
choice words there breathes a noble sense of re- 
‘sponsibility. The prophet feels that he has a post 
to hold, a rampart to guard. He knows the herit- 
| age of truth, won by the great minds of the past; 
, and, in a world seething with disorder, he will take 
his stand upon that, and see what more his God will 
_send him.’ A merchant who, to-day, finds things 


Hopeful’s Text 229 


going hardly with him, clings all the more tena- 
ciously to the treasure which he has accumulated in 
more prosperous years. Like the bees that, in the 
winter, live on the honey that they have stored in| 
the summer, the soul must learn to sing in days off 
gloom the songs that she learned in days of glad- 
ness. 

I once spent the closing days of the old year at 
the homestead of Andrew Wallace, at Twilight 
Glen, near Mosgiel. Andrew was a sturdy young 
Scotsman who had been only ten or twelve years 
out from Ayrshire. He had married a New Zea- | 
land girl and they had two children, Ian and Pearl. 
I found the youngsters great fun. One evening © 
they were showing me the presents that Santa Claus 
had brought them. The assortment included a pic- 
ture-puzzle. We all set to work fitting together 
the fantastically shaped fragments; but as the task 
approached completion it became evident that some 
of the pieces were missing. 

‘Oh,’ exclaimed Pearl, in impatient disgust, “we 
must throw them all away; they’re no good now!’ 

‘Oh, yes they are,’ replied her wiser brother, ‘the 
other pieces may turn up some day; we'll keep these 
in the cupboard till they do!’ 

That is Habakkuk’s argument exactly. When the 
soul is confronted by a perplexity that is too baffling 
for her, she is tempted to throw everything to the 
winds. But let her pause and think! Shall she 
fling away the answers to ninety-nine questions 


230 A Faggot of Torches 


| simply because there is one problem that she can- 
| not satisfactorily solve? Shall I hurl into the void 
_my hoard of golden yesterdays simply because I 
| cannot understand God’s inscrutable to-morrows? 
~ To the watch-tower! cries the prophet. 
To the ramparts! says Hopeful’s text. 
When, at some one point, faith is assailed, the time 
has come to guard her priceless hoard. 


IV 

Habakkuk is the supreme example of the Vigi- 
dance of Staggering Faith. ‘I will watch, he says; 
‘I will watch to see what He says to me!’ Hahbak- 
kuk felt, as Christian and Hopeful did, that it would 
never do to go to sleep. When the problems of life 
prove baffling, faith must remain open-eyed, quick- 
witted, and alert. The explanation of the mystery 
may arrive at any moment, and it may emerge from 
the most unlikely quarter. Under such circum- 
stances therefore, how can I consent to fold my 
hands or close my eyes or compose my mind to 
slumber? He who sleeps on the Enchanted 
Ground, the Shepherds said, will never wake again. 
He who camplacently settles down in the midst of 
his doubts can never expect to again behold the 
beatific vision. ‘I will watch! said the prophet, ‘I 
will watch! 

In the course of his Presidential Address at the 
annual meeting of the British Association, Sir 


Hopeful’s Text 231 


Michael Foster outlined the three qualifications that 
represent the essentials of a distinctively scientific 
spirit. The first is absolute truthfulness; the third 
is moral courage; and the second is ‘alertness of 
mind; a mind ever on the watch; ready at once to 
lay hold of Nature’s hint, however small; and to 
listen to Nature’s whisper, however low. — 

Habakkuk’s attitude could not have been more 
felicitously expressed. ‘I cannot solve the prob- 
lem,’ he says, ‘but I will keep my eyes wide open. 
I cannot read the riddle; but I will scan the whole 
horizon in search of the answer. I will watch, asa 
sentry watches, for any movement, any sign, any 
shadow that may denote the approach of the solu- 
tion. Remembering that those who sleep among 
their doubts sleep to wake no more, I will give my- 
self no rest nor slumber. My mind shall be vigi- 
lant, watchful, alert; ready to lay hold on any 
hint, however small, and to listen to any whisper, 
however low!’ Such wakeful eyes are seldom 
cheated of the vision for which they so tirelessly 
and hungrily watch. 


V 
Habakkuk is the supreme example of the Patience 
of a Staggering Faith. ‘Though it tarry, he says, ‘I 
will wait for it.’ If often tarries. It did in Hope- 
ful’s case. 
‘And did the Father reveal the Son to you?’ 
‘No, not at the first, nor second, nor third, nor 


232 A Faggot of Torches 


fourth, nor the fifth, no, nor at the sixth time 
neither.’ 

‘Had you no thoughts of leaving off praying?’ 

“Yes, a hundred times twice told.’ 

The vision tarried; but Hopeful remembered 
Habakkuk. ‘Though it tarry, wait for it And, 
waiting, he soon found his heart full of joy, his 
eyes full of tears and his affections running over. 

Patience was ever the golden key that opened the 
gates of vision. Richard Jefferies used to talk to 
his friends of the wonders he had seen in the woods 
—the pheasant down in the fern, the hare out in the 
open, the squirrel perched in the pine-trees, and the 
woodpecker up in the copse. As soon as they were 
at liberty to do so, his delighted hearers would set 
off to see these pretty creatures for themselves. But 
they invariably returned disappointed from their 
quest. 

“We went to the fern and saw no pheasants,’ they 
would complain; ‘there was no squirrel in the pine- 
tree, no hare in the stubble, and no woodpecker in 
the copse! How is it that you saw these things and 
we didn’t?’ ; 

‘Because,’ Jefferies would reply with a chuckle, 
‘because I didn’t mind crouching for two hours in 
a wet ditch!’ 

Darwin watched his earthworms for twenty-nine 
years to learn the secrets with which he afterwards 
astonished the world. M. Fabre, the Virgil of the 
Insects,’ was said to have been ‘an incomparable 


Hopeful’s Text 233 


observer.’ And, when he died, the Times remarked 
that, ‘in this age of haste, his example was a valu- 
able and lofty lesson. For seventy years he had 
bent over the same task, and he seemed to be telling 
those who were in a hurry to achieve a fleeting repu- 
tation that, in order to lay the foundations of a 
solid and durable monument, the whole life of a 
“man is not too much.’ The vision tarried, but he 
waited, and, by waiting, came to his own. 

‘Wait and see!’ we say. To wait isto see. When 
John Linnell, the famous artist, was painting the 
picture that he regarded as his masterpiece, some of 
his friends displayed a tiresome anxiety to view it 
before it was ready. Linnell was particularly sen- 
sitive on the point, and, fearing that, in his absence, 
some curious visitor might invade the sanctity of 
his studio, he kept the easel veiled. And across the 
veil he threw a streamer bearing the inscription 
‘Wait and you shall see!’ 

That inscription across the veiled picture is the 
inscription that is written across all veiled things. 
Our mysteries yield to patience, and to patience 
only. Waiting is the secret of seeing. The vision 
that will banish my perplexities may tarry, says the 
prophet; but, though it tarry, I will watt for it. 


VI 
Habakkuk is the supreme example of the Witness — 
of a Staggering Faith. The moment that the vision 
comes, he is prepared to pass it on. “Write the 


234 A Faggot of Torches 


vision and make it plain upon tables that he may run 
that readeth it.’ He stands, like a telegraphist at 
the receiver, interpreting the message, and simul- 
taneously, preparing to despatch it. The moment 
that his own perplexities are scattered, the prophet 
will do his best to dispel the cheerless gloom of 
every other doubter. 

‘This was a revelation to your soul, indeed? said 
Christian, after listening to Hopeful’s affecting re- 
cital. ‘Tell me particularly what effect this had 
upon your spirit!’ 

‘It made me love a holy life and long to do some- 
thing for the honour and glory of the Lord Jesus. 
Yea, I thought that, had I now a thousand gallons 
of blood in my body, I could spill it all for the sake 
of the Lord Jesus.’ 

Every man who, after long waiting and eager 
watching, has at last caught the vision that has filled 
his life with splendour, will sympathise and under- 
stand, 





XX 
MR. GLADSTONE’S: TEXT 


I 
In the year in which Queen Victoria was born, Mr. 
Gladstone celebrated his tenth birthday. In that 
year his mother wrote to tell a friend of hers, with 
unspeakable thankfulness, that her boy had been 
‘truly converted to God.’ Nobody has been able to 
trace the exact circumstances that prompted her to 
use that striking phrase. We only know that when 
that illustrious son of hers emerged from the pri- 
vacy of his early home into the limelight of public 
notice, his faith was, as Lord Rosebery has finely 
put it, part of the very fibre of his being. In his 
monumental Life of Gladstone, Lord Morley quotes 
a sentence from the distinguished statesman’s diary 
which, he says, is the biographic clue to his entire 
career. Mr. Gladstone inscribed that pregnant sen- 
tence in his diary at the age of twenty-one. “In 
practice,’ he says, ‘the great thing is that. the life of 
God may be the habit of my soul. He lived for 
nearly seventy years after that, and never for a mo- 
ment swerved by a hairbreadth from his youthful 
ideal. Exactly fifty years later, I find him coveting 


235 


236 A Faggot of Torches 


above all else, ‘that personal and experimental com- 
munion of the human soul with God, which, profit- 
ing by all ordinances, is tied to none.’ He longs, 
he says, “for the faith that abides, through all its 
varying moods, in the inner court of that sanctuary 
whose walls are not built with hands.’ This was 
his passion to the very end. ‘On the tenth of May, 
1898,’ says the Bishop of St. Andrews, ‘I knelt by 
his deathbed and received his parting benediction. 
As I turned away, I felt that I had been on the 
Mount of Transfiguration and had seen a glimpse of 
Paradise through the Gates Ajar.’ 

In those days Lord Rosebery and Lord Salisbury 
were the two outstanding personalities in the rival 
camps into which the political life of Great Britain 
was divided. On one subject their lordships were 
in perfect agreement. 

‘The world thought of Gladstone as a politician,’ 
said Lord Rosebery, into whose hands Mr. Glad- 
stone relinquished the leadership. ‘To those of us_ 
who were privileged to enjoy his friendship, his 
politics seems but the least part of him. Indeed, I 
sometimes doubt whether his natural bent was to- 
wards politics at all. The predominating part, to 
which all else was subordinated, was his religion. 
An intimate and vital religious experience was the 
essence, the savour and the motive power of his 
whole life.’ 

‘He has left behind him,’ said Lord Salisbury, 
the Conservative Prime Minister, ‘he has left be- 


Mr. Gladstone’s Text 237 


hind him the memory of a great Christian states- 
man. He will be remembered, not so much for the 
causes in which he was engaged, or the political 
projects which he favoured, but as an example, of 
which history hardly furnishes a parallel, of a great 
Christian man.’ 


II 


One of the most charming and revealing sketches 
of Mr. Gladstone’s private and inner life is that 
which Lady Battersea has given us in her Reminis- 
cences. She and her husband were often the guests 
of Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone at Hawarden. Lady 
Battersea tells of the quiet, old-world Sundays in 
the peaceful and beautiful home; she describes the 
pretty drive to the village church; she speaks of Mr. 
Gladstone as, with reverent and perfectly modu- 
lated voice, he read the lessons, and read them in 
such a way that every syllable was arresting and 
impressive; and she lets us overhear some of those 
heart-to-heart talks in which hours melted away 
like moments. After one of these delightful con- 
versations, Lady Battersea handed Mr. Gladstone 
a book and begged him to inscribe it with a favour- 
ite motto or quotation. He did not hesitate for a 
second. Taking his pen he wrote out at once a verse 
from the seventeenth Psalm. Keep me as the apple of 
Thine eye: hide me under the shadow of Thy wings. 
The words are eminently characteristic; they gather 
to themselves the essential elements of that noble 


238 A Faggot of Torches 


faith which, according to all the witnesses, was the 
finest thing about him. 


Til 


Mr. Gladstone was a tremendous believer in the 
Unutterable Value of the Individual Soul. ‘Keep 
me, cries the Psalmist, ‘as the apple of Thine eye.’ 
‘The apple of the eye—that tenderest piece of the 
tenderest part!’ says old John Trapp. ‘What close- 
ness of union with God that lovely figure implies,’ 
says Dr. Maclaren, ‘and what sedulous guardian- 
ship it implores!’ The words mean, if they mean 
anything, that the soul is as precious to God as my 
eye is to me; and that God is as sensitive to any in- 
jury done to the soul as I am to any injury done 
to the apple of my eye. David believed that, and 
so did Mr. Gladstone. 

It was, in his judgement, the only adequate ex- 
planation of all the facts of the case. It was the 
only adequate explanation of Jesus Christ; and, to 
him, Christ was the centre of everything. Christ 
was not merely an adornment of his religion, as a 
stained-glass window is an adornment of a church; 
Christ was his religion. ‘Christianity is Christ,’ he 
wrote to a gentleman at Manchester in 1877; and, 
eleven years later, he declared, in the columns of the 
Nineteenth Century, that ‘Christianity without 
Christ is no Christianity.’ He liked to think, he 
said, that that wondrous birth at Bethlehem ‘brought 
righteousness out of the region of cold abstrac- 


OO 


Mr. Gladstone’s Text 239 


tions, clothed it in flesh and blood, opened for it the 
shortest way to all our sympathies; gave it the firm- 
est command over the springs of human action, and, 
by incorporating it in a Person, made it lovable.’ 

The memorial to Mr. Gladstone at Hawarden 
bears a striking inscription. It is a sentence from 
his own pen: 


adits LING) ALE Vi Ri ee ALL 

AM, 1S-BASED ON THE DIVINITY OF 

JESUS GARIST,; THE CENTRAL HOPE 
OF OUR POOR WAYWARD RACE. 


‘I was preaching in New York in 1893,’ says Dr. 
Kerr Boyce Tupper, in explaining the origin of the 
words. ‘The Mayor of the city was in the congre- 
gation, and said to me at the close, “I am intellec- 
tually convinced of the Deity of Christ, but it would 
be a buttress to my faith if I could have a declara- 
tion from a man like Mr. Gladstone.” That after- 
noon I wrote to Mr. Gladstone, pointing out that 
this was no impertinent autograph hunt, but the 
honest appeal of a man who, in his own sphere, pos- 
sessed all the possibilities of great usefulness. 
Within eighteen days I received from Mr. Glad- 
stone the words of the inscription quoted on the 
Hawarden memorial. That Mayor is to-day leader 
of a class of a hundred and fifty young men.’ 

Christianity is Christ, and without Christ there 1s 
no Christiamty! 


240 A Faggot of Torches 


Jesus Christ, the Central Hope of our Poor Way- 
ward Race! 

With all the force of his mighty intellect, and 
with all the intensity of his great soul, Mr. Glad- 
stone believed in Jesus Christ and Him Crucified. 
‘I commend myself,’ he says in his will, ‘to the in- 
finite mercies of God in the Incarnate Son, as my 
only and sufficient hope.’ He stakes everything, for 
time and for eternity, on the redeeming efficacy of 
the Cross. But how can I explain the Saviour, and 
how can I explain His Cross, unless I believe with 
David that the individual soul is as precious to God 
as my eye is to me, and that God is as sensitive to 
any injury done to the soul as I am to any injury 
done to the apple of my eye? 

‘Shall I ever forget,’ says the Bishop of St. An- 
drews, who shared Mr. Gladstone’s most intimate 
and most sacred confidences, ‘shall I ever forget an 
hour that we spent together in the library of Hawar- 
den, which is for ever to me consecrated ground? 
He opened his inmost heart to me. He showed that 
he felt sin to be a horrible thing, a cursed thing, 
a thing that nailed the Son of God to the Cross; 
he regarded even the least sin as an abomination 
in the sight of God.’ He believed with David 
that the tiniest sin that settled on his soul was as 
painful to God as the almost invisible speck of grit 
blown by the wind into his own eye. And there- 
fore he prayed that he might be kept from con- 
tamination, 


EE ae 


Mr. Gladstone’s Text 241 


‘Keep me,’ he cried, ‘keep me—keep me as the 
apple of Thine eye? 


IV 


Mr. Gladstone was a tremendous believer in the 
Parental Care of God. ‘Hide me, cried the Psalm- 
ist, whose words he adopted as his own, ‘hide me 
under the shadow of Thy wings. It is the cry of 
the young bird to its mother. The outspread wings 
are its natural refuge. It loves to be sheltered; it 
loves to feel warm; it loves, above all, to be near. 

Now, at first blush, the image scarcely seems fit- 
ting. We do not associate the emotions of a fledg- 
ling with commanding personalities like Mr. Glad- 
stone. But humanity, in any of its various forms, 
is wonderfully human. It is the cry of the young 
bird, the cry for protection and warmth and the 
mother’s caress, that Mr. Gladstone inscribes as his 
own in Lady Battersea’s album. ‘Hide me under 
the shadow of Thy wings. And anybody who cares 
to turn to the biographies of Gladstone will find this 
phase of the great statesman’s faith constantly re- 
flected there. He liked to feel that God was very 
near, and that, whenever he would he could shelter 
in the secret of His Presence. Mr. David William- 
son has told us how Mr. Gladstone once took him 
over Hawarden. Over the bed there hung a text: 
Underneath are the everlasting arms. ‘That,’ ex- 
claimed Mr. Gladstone, pointing to it, “that is my 
greatest comfort!’ It is the same thought under a 


242 A Faggot of Torches 


slightly changed image—the sheltering wings, the 
sustaining arms! Mr. Gladstone was always a 
child—a child revelling in the Parental love and 
care. 

No passages in his diary are more impressive than 
those in which he tells of the texts which, in mo- 
ments of anxiety and crisis, lifted his thoughts 
above the dust of earthly conflict into the very peace 
of heaven. All through life it was an infinite com- 
fort and strength to him that his mind was drenched 
and saturated with the Scriptures. From boyhood 
he knew his Bible from cover to cover. In his diary 
I find this entry, written when he was twenty years 
of age. ‘Rode over to the mill at Kincairn to see 
Mackay: he was shot last night. He was suffering 
much and seemed near death. Read the Holy 
Scriptures to him’—and he mentions the six pas- 
sages that he selected. 

‘On most occasions of very sharp pressure or 
trial,’ he says, ‘some word of Scripture has come 
home to me as if borne on angels’ wings.’ Thus, in 
the winter of 1837, he tells us that the one hundred 
and twenty-eighth Psalm helped him in a most sin- 
gular manner, although, he adds, it would be a long 
story to tell. In connexion with every momentous 
happening in his eventful life, he tells of the pas- 
sage that flashed into his mind, bringing courage 
and comfort and peace. When, as Chancellor of 
the Exchequer, he rose to deliver his first Budget 
speech in the House of Commons, he remembered 





Mr. Gladstone’s Text 243 


and silently repeated the Psalmist’s prayer, ‘O turn 
Thee unto me, and have mercy upon me: give Thy 
strength unto Thy servant, and help the son of Thine 
handmaid’ During the anxious days of the Cri- 
mean War, the Twenty-third Psalm sang its shep- 
herd song unceasingly within his soul. 

At length, in his sixtieth year, he became Prime 
Minister—the greatest honour that can fall to the 
lot of any Englishman. And how did he receive it? 
He felt that he needed the divine help as he had 
never needed it before. Hide me, he cried, from the 
very depths of his soul, hide me under the shadow of 
Thy wings. Heat once sought his friend, the Bishop 
of St. Andrews, and asked that he might enter into 
a realization of his Lord’s presence at the Com- 
munion Table. ‘I remember him coming,’ says the 
Bishop, ‘as he always did on every emergency, great 
or small. To see him at Communion was to have 
an object-lesson in adoring worship. I see him now 
as he knelt there that day. His soul was literally 
feeding on the Body and Blood of Christ. Com- 
municants went up and came back; but he remained 
absorbed in fellowship with his Saviour. He was 
there till the end of the service. He had lost all 
thought of man.’ 

There, then, he is! Like the young bird that, at 
every unwonted sight and at every disturbing 
sound, seeks the brooding shelter of its mother’s 
wing, he allows every new experience to drive him 
into the secret of the Divine Presence. ‘Hide me, 


244 A Faggot of Torches 


he cries, over and over and over again, ‘hide me 
under the shadow of Thy wings’ 


iV 

Mr. Gladstone had a tremendous consciousness of 
his deep and incessant need. ‘Keep me,’ he cried 
with the Psalmist, ‘keep me, keep me!’ “Hide me,’ 
he cried with the Psalmist, ‘hide me, hide me!’— 
keep me as the apple of Thine eye: hide me under 
the shadow of Thy wings! 

I find that profound consciousness of personal 
need in some of the earliest entries in his diary: it 
was with him to the last. When he lay dying, Mrs. 
Benson, the widow of the Archbishop Benson, went 
to see him. ‘Mrs. Drew told him,’ she says, ‘that it 
was I. He took my hand and kissed it, and then 
said: “God bless you. Will you give me your 
prayers?” I told him that he always had them— 
that I prayed for him continually. “Nobody,” he 
answered, ‘nobody needs them more than the poor 
sinner who lies here before you!” ’ 

‘A great Christian!’ exclaimed Lord Salisbury in 
the House of Lords, a few days later, ‘an example 
of which history hardly furnishes a parallel of a 
great Christian man!’ 

‘A poor sinner!’ he himself cries, on his death- 
bed, ‘nobody needs your prayers more than the poor 
sinner who lies here before you!’ 

When he received the Communion for the last 
time he remained in bed until the time came for the 


Mr. Gladstone’s Text 245 


confession and the absolution. And then, although 
ordered to remain there, he insisted on rising and 
receiving on his knees the assurance of forgiveness 
and the holy emblems of his Saviour’s body and 
blood. 

‘Keep me,’ he cried, ‘keep me! In life and in 
death, keep me as the apple of Thine eye! 

‘Hide me,’ he cried, ‘hide me! In life and in 
death, hide me under the shadow of Thy wings! 

That two-fold cry was wonderfully answered. 
He prayed to be kept; and his life was an example 
of stainless purity. ‘As a boy at Eton,’ says one 
who knew him there, ‘he trained himself with hard 
discipline, and would never allow his eyes to look, 
or his mind to dwell, on anything that was not pure 
and lovely. He was like a young knight girding 
on his armour for a life-long effort.’ His purity was 
an infectious purity: it made others pure. ‘I was a 
thoroughly idle boy at school,’ says the Bishop of 
Salisbury, ‘but I was saved from worse things by 
getting to know Gladstone.’ As a young man in 
London, he was horrified by the tragedies of the city 
streets, and he solemnly vowed that he would never 
rest until he had won back to purity and gladness 
some of the women whose lives had been wrecked 
by the selfishness of men. At Oxford he set his 
heart upon entering the ministry. “He was nearer 
to being a clergyman than I was,’ says Cardinal 
Manning, ‘and he was as fit for it as I was unfit.’ 
‘Keep me!’ he cried; and he was so perfectly kept 


246 A Faggot of Torches 


that the Right Hon. G. W. E. Russell declares that 
‘if ever we are tempted to despond about the pos- 
sibilities of human nature, we shall bethink our- 
selves of him. If ever our faith should be per- 
plexed by blank misgivings, the memory of his 
strong confidence will reassure us.’ So completely 
was he kept! 

He prayed to be hidden—hide me under the 
shadow of Thy wings? And no man ever dwelt 
more intimately in the secret place of the Most High 
or abode more constantly under the shadow of the 
Almighty. “Rock of Ages’ was ever his favourite 
hymn. He loved to sing it, to recite it, and to trans- 
late it into other languages. It was but another 
way of praying his familiar prayer: 

Rock of Ages, cleft for me, 
Let me hide myself in Thee! 


Hide me under the shadow of Thy wings! Let 
me hide myself in Thee! And when he ‘soared to 
worlds unknown’ and ‘stood: before the Judgement 
Throne,’ his old petition was still upon his lips. 


XXI 
JOHN NELSON’S TEXT 


I 


SOUTHEY says that John Nelson had as high a spirit 
and as brave a heart as ever Englishman was blessed 
with. And Southey knew something about high 
spirits and brave hearts. For Southey had already 
written the standard biography of Lord Nelson, the 
greatest sailor since the world began. Yet, after 
having considered all the classic and heroic ex- 
amples of that adventurous period, Southey is of the 
deliberate opinion that John Nelson, the sturdy 
Yorkshire stone-mason, is second in courage to none 
of them. Square-headed and square-shouldered 
was John Nelson, of stalwart frame and tough sin- 
ews and rugged speech. I seem to see him now 
with his massive countenance, his heavy chin, his 
high forehead, his piercing eyes and his wealth of 
long brown hair. In preaching, he uses a washtub, 
mouth downwards, for a pulpit; his hammer is 
stuck in the string of his leather apron to one side, 
and his trowel on the other. Later on I see him 
again, wearing his picturesque three-cornered hat, 
his blue frock coat and knee-breeches, his stiff high 
collar and his white cravat. His eyes twinkle with 


247 


248 A Faggot of Torches 


good humour and his soul is rich in commonsense. 
He is a man who knows his own mind; he likes 
deeds better than words. When applying for work 
on one occasion, he was asked whether he could 
carve a pig-trough. Asking for a block of stone, 
he carved on it a sow feeding her litter; and was 
instantly engaged. That was his style. His story, 
as Dr. Fitchett says, is as moving a bit of English 
as is to be found in the literature of the eighteenth 
century; and his valiant pilgrimage constitutes it- 
self one of the golden memories of that stirring 
time. A very gallant gentleman was John Nelson. 


II 


Bunyan speaks of the Three Shining Ones that 
the Pilgrims saw at the Cross. The Three Shining 
Ones that led John Nelson into the Kingdom of 
Christ were three texts. The first filled him with 
unutterable dread; the second inspired a pleasing 
hope; and the third overwhelmed him with a joy 
unspeakable and full of glory. 

I. The First Shining One—the text that fright- 
ened him—broke upon his startled vision when he 
was only a boy. It was a Sunday evening; the 
household had gathered for family worship; and 
John curled himself up on the floor at his father’s 
feet. Mr. Nelson read, from the twentieth chapter 
of the Book of Revelation, of the Great White 
Throne and of the host of the dead, small and great, 
standing before it. “The word came with such light 


John Neison’s Text 240 


and power to my soul,’ Nelson tells us, ‘that it made 
me tremble, as if a dart were shot at my heart. I fell 
with my face on the floor, and wept till the place 
was as wet where I lay as if water had been poured 
thereon. As my father proceeded, I thought I saw 
everything he read about, though my eyes were 
shut; and the sight was so terrible I was about to 
stop my ears that I might not hear, but I durst not; 
as soon as I put my fingers in my ears I pulled them 
back again. The words made me cringe and my 
flesh seemed to creep on my bones. I shed many 
tears in private; yet, when I returned to my com- 
panions, I wiped my face and went back again to my 
folly. But,’ he significantly adds, ‘Oh the hell that I 
found in my mind when I was alone!’ 

The Second Shining One—the text that whis- 
pered to his distracted soul its message of hope— 
delayed its coming for more than twenty years. It 
is Sunday, June 17, 1739—a notable date in the 
experience of John Nelson, and a notable date in 
the experience of John Wesley. On this morning, 
at seven o’clock, Mr. Wesley preaches his first ser- 
mon at Moorfields. Early as is the hour, a vast 
concourse has assembled. John Wesley, hating ex- 
aggerations, computes it at six or seven thousand; 
his brother, Charles Wesley, estimates that there 
are nearly ten. John Nelson is among them. He is 
now thirty-two years of age, but he has never suc- 
ceeded in shaking off the deep concern that crept 
into his heart that Sunday evening in his boyhood’s 





~ ee 





250 A Faggot of Torches 


home. He has been to hear many preachers. ‘I 
tried all but the Jews,’ he says; ‘I thought it was to 
no purpose to go to them.’ Even George Whitefield 
failed to comfort him. ‘He was to me as a man 
who could play well on an instrument; his preach- 
ing was pleasant unto me, and I loved the man; but 
I did not understand him.’ Then came John Wes- 
ley. ‘I was like a wandering bird, cast out of the 
nest,’ he says, ‘till Mr. John Wesley came to preach 
his first sermon in Moorfields. Oh, that was a 
blessed morning to my soul! As soon as he got 
upon the stand, he stroked back his hair, and turned 
his face towards where I stood, and, I thought, fixed 
his eyes upon me. His countenance struck such an 
awful dread upon me, before I heard him speak, 
that it made my heart beat like the pendulum of a 
clock; and, when he did speak, I thought his whole 
discourse was aimed at me.’ Mr. Wesley preached 
that morning, I find, from his Journal, on the fifty- 
fifth of Isaiah: ‘Ho, every one that thirsteth, come 
ye to the waters! Seek ye the Lord while He may 
be found, call ye upon Him while He is near. Let 
the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous 
man his thoughts; and let him return unto the Lord, 
and He will have mercy upon him; and to our God, 
for He will abundantly pardon.’ The text was al- 
ways a favourite of Mr. Wesley’s. It was, indeed, 
the text of the last sermon that he ever preached: 
but that was more than fifty years later. At about 
this time he preached on this same text at Kenning- 


John Nelson’s Text 25% 


ton, and a soldier was in the crowd. ‘His words 
made me tremble,’ this man said. ‘I thought he 
spoke to no one but me, and I durst not look up; 
for I imagined all the people were looking at me. 
But before Mr. Wesley concluded his sermon, he 
cried out: Let the wicked forsake his way, and the 
unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return 
unto the Lord, and He will have mercy upon him, 
and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon. 
“Tf that be true,” said I, “I will turn to God to- 
day!” ’ But the sermon which thus led the soldier 
into the Promised Land only led John Nelson within 
sight of it. ‘When Mr. Wesley had done,’ he says, 
‘I felt that he had read the secrets of my heart, and 
shown me the remedy, even the blood of Jesus. 
Then was my soul filled with consolation through 
hope that God, for Christ’s sake, would save me.’ 
From that moment, John Nelson, not having re- 
ceived the promise, had, nevertheless, seen it afar 
off, and saluted it and confessed that he was a 
stranger and a pilgrim on the earth. 

The Third Shining One—the text by means of 
which ‘the Lord,’ as he says, ‘wrote a pardon on my 
heart’—revealed its beauty to him three months 
later. It was the greatest day of his life, a day so 
crowded with spiritual discovery and religious 
emotion that I cannot tell with certainty whether 
the text actually opened to him the gates of the king- 
dom, or simply announced that they stood wide 
open. ‘All that day,’ he tells us, ‘I neither ate nor 


252 A Faggot of Torches 


drank anything: for, before I found peace, the hand 
of God was so heavy upon me that I refused to eat; 
and, after I found peace, I was so filled with the 
manna of redeeming love that I had no need of the 
bread that perisheth.” Of the momentous experi- 
ences of that memorable day, the text was the con- 
crete embodiment and natural expression. ‘In the 
afternoon,’ he says, ‘I opened the Book where it is 
written: Unto Him that loved us, and washed us 
from our sins in His own blood, and hath made us 
kings and priests unto God and His Father, to Him 
be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen. 
I was so affected that I could not read for weeping.’ 

The work of the Three Shining Ones was com- 
plete. His heart had shown them noble hospitality. 
With all the hosts of shining ones, they folded their 
Wings and took up their abode in the soul. 

‘Oh, the hell that I find in my heart when I am 
alone!’ he cried once. 

“Heaven in the heart! Heaven in the heart? he 
says to-day. 

I 

The text that flooded the heart of this sturdy 
Yorkshireman with such uncontrollable emotion 
stands like a City Foursquare. John Nelson walked 
about it; told the towers thereof; marked well its 
bulwarks and considered its palaces; that he might 
tell it to the generation following. So will we. 

And, viewing this fair city from the North, I am 
impressed by the acclamation of Love: ‘Unto Him 


John Nelson’s Text 253 


that loved be the glory!’ John saw, he tells us, that 
the ultimate glory will be ascribed, not to wealth, 
nor to power, nor to fame, but to love; and he saw 
that, since the Lord Jesus Christ has hopelessly out- 
distanced all his competitors in the divine art of 
loving, the final adjudication must inevitably lay the 
triumphs and trophies of the ages at His feet. 

Viewing the city from the South, I am impressed 
by the Anguish of Love: ‘Unto Him that loved us 
and washed us in His own blood.’ 

His own blood! It was this that touched to the 
quick the heart of John Nelson when he heard Mr. 
Wesley at Moorfields that early Sunday morning. 
‘He showed me the remedy, even the blood of Jesus.’ 
If it were possible for us to hear these stupendous 
syllables—with His own blood—as though we heard 
them for the first time, or with the force and fresh- 
ness with which they appealed to John Nelson that 
day, we should catch in every accent and syllable a 
throb out of the eternities, a sob out of the very 
heart of God. For these two—Passion and Pain, 
- Affection and Anguish—God hath joined together 
and no man can put them asunder. Love ever 
marches to its triumphs by way of pitch-black Geth- 
semanes and blood-red Golgothas, yet ever marches 
with radiant face and with a song upon its lips. The 
footmarks on the track along which love has gone 
always show the print of the nails. The love-letters 
of the kingdom of heaven are all of them written in 
red. 


2°4 A Faggot of Torches 


Viewing the city from the East, I am impressed 
by the Achievements of Love: ‘Unto Him that 
washed us and made us kings.’ 

Those are the eternal credentials of love. Love 
must lave and love must lift. Someone may remind 
me that it is a law of mechanics that two persons 
cannot lift each other at the same time. I can only 
reply that there is a loftier law than the law of 
mechanics. By the law of love two persons may 
simulatneously love each other into a rarer, richer 
and purer atmosphere. They may love each other 
nearer heaven. / 

And, viewing this noble city from the West, I am 
impressed by the Accession of Love: ‘Unto Him 
that loved be the glory and the dominion! 

Love is coming to the throne! It does one good 
to think of it, to speak of it, to dream of it. This 
prisoner at Patmos, in his radiant Apocalypse, saw 
that, in the end of the ages, love is coming to its 
own at last. After having for countless centuries 
been insulted by sensualists, degraded by material- 
ists, and caricatured by novelists, love will at length 
inherit the glory and the dominion! 

‘When I opened the Book and came upon these 
words,’ says John Nelson, ‘I was so affected that I 
could not read for weeping!’ I am not surprised. 


IV 


John Nelson’s text represents, not merely the in- 
strument of his conversion, but the temper and 


John Nelson’s Text 255 


spirit of his life. Charles Simeon, one of the choic- 
est spirits of his age, took the passage as his motto 
and ideal. “The words,’ he says, ‘the words “Unto 
Him thot loved us, and washed us from our sins in 
His own blood, and hath made us kings and priests 
unto God and His Father, to Him be glory and 
dominion for ever and ever’ express the very frame 
of mind in which I wish both to live and to die.’ It 
was in that sublime frame of mind that John Nel- 
son lived his heroic life and died his triumphant 
death. 

‘Unto Him that loved be the glory!’ Love was the 
splendour of John Nelson’s life. As soon as he 
passes from the story of his conversion, I find his 
journal dotted with such entries as these. ‘My wife 
began to be concerned about the salvation of her 
soul.? ‘My wife was thoroughly convinced and her 
heart was filled with peace and love.’ ‘My own 
brother was brought to experience the redeeming 
love of Christ!’ ‘My mother was the first ripe fruit 
that God gave me of my labour.’ “Another of my 
brothers, my aunt, and two cousins were converted.’ 
And, later, ‘my granddaughter rejoices in the Lord.’ 
He paid men to go and hear Mr. Wesley preach. 
He recoiled from the thought of preaching himself. 
‘I would rather be hanged!’ he said. Yet, as the 
conviction deepened within him that by preaching 
he might save others, he yielded; and his voice soon 
rang through the country. 

‘With His own Blood!’ John Nelson shared his 


256 A Faggot of Torches 


Lord’s crucifixion. He often preached with the 
blood streaming down his face and the stones whis- 
tling past his ears. He saw his wife mercilessly 
thrashed by the mob and his unborn child thereby 
killed. The authorities, hoping to silence him, de- 
livered him to the press-gang and flung him into a 
dungeon ‘that stunk worse than a hog-stye by rea- 
son of the blood and filth which came from the 
slaughter-house above.” He was often so maltreated 
that his friends thought he was dead. But, through 
it all, his faith never faltered. ‘In the dungeon,’ 
he says, ‘my soul was so filled with the love of God 
that it was paradise to me!’ And he told the story 
of redeeming love to all who came near him. 

John Nelson’s text is a Doxology. Unto Him 
that loves us with a love that no time can end and 
that no waters can quench; unto Him that laves us 
from our old black sins in His own atoning blood; 
unto Him that lifts us on to the high levels of the 
Christian life and will yet lift us beyond the stars 
of God; unto Him be the glory and the dominion 
for ever and ever! John Nelson carried the noble 
music of that rich doxology into the discords and 
drudgeries of eighteenth-century England; and, as 
all the historians confess, England was a sweeter, 
better, gladder place in consequence. 


XXIT 
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE’S TEXT 


I 


In a modest dwelling on the outskirts of the city of 
Rome, overlooking the shining waters of the Tiber, 
old Father Issachar lay dying, attended only by his 
daughter Ruth, a woman no longer young. It was 
towards the close of the first century. Issachar and 
Ruth had been among the earliest converts to the 
faith ; indeed, they had been received into the Church 
‘at Jerusalem during the great Pentecostal ingath- 
ering. For their faith they had suffered much; and 
it was in the dispersion that resulted from that piti- 
less persecution that they had been driven into Italy. 
There were times, especially in his later years, when 
the mind of Issachar went back almost wistfully to 
the days of his youth. ‘To how great splendour,’ 
Dr. F. B. Meyer exclaims, ‘had these Hebrew 
Christians been accustomed—marbled courts, 
throngs of white-robed Levites, splendid vestments, 
the state and pomp of symbol ceremonial and choral 
psalm! And to what a contrast were they reduced 
—a meeting in some hall or school with the poor, 
afflicted, and persecuted members of a despised and 


257. 


258 A Faggot of Torches 


hated sect!’ Who can wonder that, in his infirmity, 
Issachar should ponder the ornate ritual that had so 
often impressed his youth? 

And Issachar was dying! For some months he 
had been unable to attend the sanctuary. He had, 
however, insisted on Ruth’s going; and she had care- 
fully repeated to her father on her return the words 
of hope and grace to which she had herself listened. 
And of late her story had been particularly interest- 
ing to him. For her heart was full of a wonderful 
letter that, in sections, the minister was reading to - 
his faithful people. It was a letter addressed to 
Jewish converts, pointing out to them the incalcu- 
lable wealth of their invisible inheritance and implor- 
ing them to remain steadfast in their new faith. Asa 
rule, Ruth trusted to her memory; but one day the 
reading seemed so majestic and affecting that she 
asked permission to remain behind and copy out 
the sentences that had so impressed her in order 
that she might convey them in their integrity to 
her aged father. The words that she copied were 
these: 

For ye are not come unto the mount that might 
be touched, and that burned with fire, nor unto 
blackness, and darkness, and tempest. 

And the sound of a trumpet, and the voice of 
words; which voice they that heard intreated that 
the word should not be spoken to them any more. 

(For they could not endure that which was com- 
manded. And if so much as a beast touch the moun- 


Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Text 259 


tain, it shall be stoned, or thrust through with a dart. 

And so terrible was the sight, that Moses said, I 
exceedingly fear and quake.) 

But ye are come unto Mount Sion, and unto the 
city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and 
to an innumerable company of angels. 

To the general assembly and church of the first 
born, which are written im heaven, and to God 
the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made 
perfect. 

And to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, 
and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better 
things than that of Abel. 

And when she read them to Issachar, the old 
man’s face oe radiant. sicied owl 

“Yes, yes,’ he exclaimed, ‘there come times when 
we children of the covenant look back to the old 
days and the old order; and we fancy that we re- 
linquished more than we afterwards received. But, 
oh, Ruth, it is a great and terrible delusion! We 
only gave up the shadow because we had found the 
substance.’ 

Every day Issachar implored his daughter to bring 
to his bedside her worn but precious manuscript; 
and every day the words grew in meaning to him. 

‘Yes,’ he exclaimed one day, ‘we gave up the 
shadow because we had found the substance. We 
gave up the material—the mount that could be 
touched—for the spiritual—Sion, radiant with light 
and gladness. We gave up the revelation that was 


260 A Faggot of Torches 


clouded and obscure for a revelation that a child 
can understand. We gave up a revelation that was 
narrow and exclusive—only Moses was allowed to 
draw nigh—for a revelation that is all-embracing 
and universal. We gave up a revelation that was 
terrible and forbidding—even Moses exceedingly 
feared and quaked—for a revelation that is all grace 
and pity and love. We gave up a revelation that 
shut us out for a revelation that takes us all in. 
“Ye are come to Mount Sion—ye are come to God 
the Judge of all—ye are come to Jesus!’ The holi- 
est is open to the lowliest!' There was nothing in the 
old order to be compared with that!’ 

The old man insisted on having the golden sen- 
tences read to him on the day on which he died; and, 
to the end of her own life, Ruth pondered their pro- 
found significance with ever-increasing delight. 

To a Jew the words add a new glory to the 
thought of the invisible and eternal ‘Ye are come 
. ...3 he has not to rely upon the appearance within 
the veil of the priest on his behalf; he may stand for 
himself in the holiest of all. ‘Ye are come...’; 
his entrance upon his eternal inheritance is not a 
possibility of the future; it is an experience of the 
living present. The feet of the believing Jew are on 
Mount Sion; he is already a citizen of the heavenly 
Jerusalem; he is a member of the general assembly 
and church of the first-born; cohorts of angels at- 
tend him at every step. ‘Ye are come to God... 
Ye are come to Jesus’; the way is open; the door 


A 


Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Text 261 


stands wide; man holds rapt, familiar intercourse 
with God! 

To a Hebrew mind the words impart, moreover, 
a new splendour to the thought of immortality. 
Every Jew had some vague expectation of a life be- 
yond the grave. The Old Testament seemed to en- 
courage such a confidence. But the language was 
scarcely calculated to awaken enthusiasm. No Jew 
ever went into transports over the promise of im- 
mortality contained in the ancient documents. But 
how different was this! It fills in the blanks. It 
irradiates the dim and shadowy hope. The new 
phraseology compares with the old as a painting of 
the sunset by Turner compares with a mere photo- 
graph of the same sublime spectacle. The ancient 
scriptures led a Jew to expect some ghostly exist- 
ence beyond the chilly darkness of the grave: the 
glowing message of the new revelation made him 
feel that, after death, he would find himself sur- 
rounded by an innumerable company of angels; he 
would hold high converse with prophets and patri- 
archs; he would gaze with unveiled face upon the 
exalted and glorified Person of his Redeemer. 


II 
But the stirring phrases do not confine their up- 
lifting ministry to the Jews of a day that is dead. 
‘That Scripture is worth a thousand thousand 
thoughts,’ exclaimed Richard Baxter, on his death- 
bed, when these majestic sentences were read to 


262 A Faggot of Torches 


him. ‘At another time,’ says John Bunyan, Bax- 
ter’s great contemporary, ‘at another time there fell 
upon me a great cloud of thick darkness which did 
so hide from me the things of God that I was as if 
I had never known them. I was as if my bones 
were broken or as if my hands and feet had been 
tied or bound with chains.’ ‘I Jay long at 
Sinai,’ he says in another passage, ‘and saw the fire 
and the cloud and the darkness.’ ‘But,’ he adds, 
‘after I had been some three or four days in this 
condition, as I was sitting by the fire, I suddenly 
felt this word to sound in my heart: J must go to 
Jesus! At this my former darkness fled away and 
the blessed: things of heaven were set in my view. 
“Wife,” said I, on being thus surprised, “is there 
ever such a scripture, J must go to Jesus?’ She 
said she could not tell; therefore I sat musing still 
to see if I could remember such a passage. But I 
had not sat above two or three minutes when there 
came bolting in upon me, And to an innumerable 
company of angels ...and to God... and to 
Jesus; and withal, the twelfth of Hebrews, about 
Mount Sion, was set before mine eyes. 

‘Then, with joy, I told my wife, “O, now I know, 
I know!” ‘That night was a good night to me; I 
never had but few better; I longed for the company 
of some of God’s people that I might have imparted 
unto them what Ged had showed me. Christ was a 
precious Christ to my soul that night; I could scarce 
lie in my bed for joy and peace and triumph. This 


= —- a 


Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Text 263 


great glory did not continue, yet the twelfth of He- 
brews about Mount Sion was a blessed scripture to 
me for many days together after this. 

‘The words are these: Ye are come to Mount 
Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heav- 
enly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of 
angels, to the general assembly and church of the 
first-born, which are written in heaven; and to God 
the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made 
perfect, and to Jesus the Mediator of the New Cove- 
nant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh 
better things than that of Abel. Through this 
blessed sentence the Lord led me over and over, 
first to this word, and then to that; and showed me 
wonderful glory in every one of them. These words 
also have oft since that time been great refresh- 
ment to my spirit. Blessed be God for having 
mercy on me.’ 

III 

Now if these golden words are as full of grace 
and power as this old Jew of the first century, and 
this immortal dreamer of the seventeenth, would 
lead us to suppose, they ought by this time to have 
demonstrated their transforming efficacy on the 
broader fields of history. But have they? “The. 
death knell of American slavery,’ says David Liv- 
ingstone, in writing to his daughter Agnes, ‘the 
death knell of American slavery was rung by a 
woman’s hand.’ And what was it that moved the 
soul of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe to that great 


264 A Faggot of Torches 


historic task? She has herself told us. The most 
formative influence in her life, she says, was the 
influence of her mother; and she could never think 
of her mother without thinking of her mother’s 
text. ‘For,’ she says, ‘there was one passage of 
scripture always associated with her in our childish 
minds. It was this: “For ye are not come unto the 
mount that burned with fire, nor unto blackness and 
darkness and tempest; but ye are come unto Mount 
Sion, the city of the living God, to the heavenly 
Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of an- 
gels, to the general assembly and church of the first- 
born, and to the spirits of just men made perfect.” 
We all knew,’ Mrs. Stowe continues, ‘that this was 
what our father repeated to her when she was dy- 
ing, and we often repeated it to each other. It was 
to that we felt we must attain, though we scarcely 
knew how. In every scene of family joy or sorrow, 
or when father wished to make an appeal to our 
hearts that he knew we could not resist, he spoke 
of mother!’ | 

The book by means of which Mrs. Harriet 
Beecher Stowe contrived to infect the world with 
her own implacable hatred of slavery is drenched 
from cover to cover with the noble thought embed- 
ded in the text. When, for example, little Eva lies 
dying, with Uncle Tom sitting sadly beside her, she 
speaks of the heavenly Jerusalem, and of the in- 
numerable company of angels, and of Jesus. And 
Uncle Tom’s eyes sparkle at every word. For, 


Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Text 265 


though a slave, Uncle Tom has learned to love with . 
all his heart and strength and soul the sacred things 
that are so precious to his frail young mistress. He, 
like her, has entered into the unsearchable riches of 
Christ. The argument is obvious and unanswer- 
able. Ifa slave can come to Mount Sion and unto 
the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, 
and to an innumerable company of angels, to the 
general assembly and church of the first-born, which 
are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, 
and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to 
Jesus, how can you set him up on an auction block 
and sell him, body and soul, from one white man 
to another? That was the sublime discovery that 
underlay the abolition of slavery. 


IV 

I lay long at Sinai! says John Bunyan. Sinai 
the mount that might be touched and that burned 
with fire, covered with blackness and darkness and 
tempest! And so horrible was the sight that Moses 
said, I exceedingly fear and quake! ‘I lay long at 
Sinai?’ Too long, perhaps! For, in Pilgrim’s 
Progress, the road to the Cross seems to be a need- 
lessly tiresome and tedious one. The text comforts 
us by telling us that, in point of fact, we need not 
visit Sinai at all! ‘Ye are not come to the mount 
that might be touched and that burned with fire, 
but ye are come unto Mount Sion and to Jesus’ 
We all feel that we were present at that memorable 


266 A Faggot of Torches 


Kirk Session at Drumtochty, which Ian Maclaren 
has so vividly described. Jessie, aspiring to be num- 
bered among the young communicants, is before 
the elders, and is being examined. Burnbrae asks 
her a few questions, and is satisfied. Burnbrae is 
a big-hearted man, with a fatherly manner, and 
Jessie said afterwards that he treated her as if she 
were his ain bairn. But after Burnbrae comes 
Lachlan Campbell. Lachlan stands for inflexible 
justice. He soon has poor Jessie on the rack. 

“How old will you be?’ 

‘Ouchteen next Martinmas.’ 

‘And why will you be coming to the Sacrament ?”’ 

‘Ma mother thoucht it was time,’ with a threaten- 
ing of tears, as she looks at the harsh face of Lach- 
lan Campbell. 

‘Ye will, maybe, tell the Session what has been 
your law-work, and how long ye haf been at Sinai! 

‘I dinna ken what yir askin’,’ replies Jessie, break- 
ing down utterly. ‘I was never out o’ Drumtochty!’ 

Sinai! Here was a mountain peak to so suddenly 
confront the astonished gaze of a young communi- 
cant! Sznat, the mount that burned with fire, the 
mount that was swathed in blackness and darkness 
and tempest ! 

‘I lay long at Sinai!’ says Bunyan. 

‘How long haf ye been at Sinai!’ asks Lachlan 
Campbell of poor Jessie. 

But Jessie need not be ashamed or confounded 
beneath the old elder’s cross-examination. 


— 


Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Text 267 


‘Ve are not come to the mount that burned with 
fire, says the text, ‘but ye are come to Mount Sion,’ 
And Jessie is able to convince the elders that, 
though the first is a foreign territory to her, she is 
perfectly at home in the second. She has come to 
Jesus, the Mediator of the new Covenant, and to the 
blood of sprinkling that speaketh better things than 
that of Abel, and, as a consequence, she has come 
to Mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, 
to the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable 
company of angels, to the general assembly and 
church of the first-born which are written in heaven, 
and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of 
just men made perfect. 

‘I move,’ says Burnbrae, as Jessie stands weep- 
ing and discomfited, ‘I move, Moderator, that she 
get her token. Dinna greet, lassie, for ye’ve done 
weel, and the Session’s rael satisfied.” The motion 
is carried, and Jessie goes away comforted. 

I should like to have seen Jessie on the day of 
that first communion of hers. Jan Maclaren says 
nothing about it, but, somehow, I fancy that the 
communion hymn on that never-to-be-forgotten 
Sabbath was Mrs. Alexander’s 

There is a green hill far away, 
Without a city wall, 


Where the dear Lord was crucified 
Who died to save us all. 


And when she joined with wavering, tremulous 
voice in singing that lovely hymn, Jessie forgot all 


268 A Faggot of Torches 


about Lachlan Campbell’s uncomfortable questions. 
She felt—as we all feel—that, once the eyes have 
rested on that green and holy hill, no other moun- 
tain, however lofty, is worth worrying about. 

Even Moses, the only person permitted to ap- 
proach it, exceedingly feared and quaked as he 
drew near to the mount that burned with fire; but 
the beauty of the gospel is that a wayfaring man, 
though a fool, may find his way to Mount Sion; 
a dying thief may enter Paradise side by side with 
his Lord; and the heavenly city is ‘full of boys and 
girls playing in the streets thereof.’ 


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